On Friday, December 9th at ~4:00pm GMT (Greenwich mean time):
Nuclear: 5.25 GW
Wind: 3.84 GW
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines: 23.31 GW
Solar (Estimated): 0.35GW
Installed Wind Capacity (onshore + offshore): 25 GW [0]
Installed Solar Capacity: 13.4 GW [1]
Total installed Wind/Solar: 38.4 GW. Total produced: 4.11 GW
Wind is currently producing 15% of its installed capacity. Solar is producing 2.6% of its installed capacity. Combined, the renewables are at almost 11% of their installed capacity. Gas turbines are making up the difference.
Lots of you are cheerleaders for "renewables". They seem like a transitional technology to me. If hydrocarbons are ever going to be retired from use, nuclear sure does seem like the only option.
It seems to me like humanity's only hope is a breakthrough in our understanding of the laws of nature.
> Arizona has the reputation of being a desert, but in reality it is a state that is half-desert and half-mountain, and has a tons of water.
The mountainous areas are 'high deserts'. Most of Arizona's water is underground. It's being pumped out faster than it's replaced. Old wells go dry all the time, because newer wells are deeper.
"The Sonoran Desert's bi-seasonal rainfall pattern results in more plant species than any other desert in the world. The Sonoran Desert includes plant genera and species from the agave family, palm family, cactus family, legume family, and numerous others." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_Desert#Flora
> There is a canal system taking the water from the mountains to the drier south where people live.
The Central Arizona Project pumps water straight east from Lake Havasu (738 ft elevation) to Phoenix (1086 ft elevation), then south to Tucson (2388 ft elevation).
The Salt River Project [SRP] buffers water from the rivers that run through the Phoenix area, and diverts the rivers into canals for delivery to the Phoenix area. Before the dams, the Salt and Verde rivers ran year-round. SRP modernized/expanded the Hohokam's ancient canals.
The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art. More convenient access to "rides" is a bandaid on the mistake of building communities for cars instead of people, with systems that by their very nature concentrate wealth and encourage poverty.
I started driving for the taxi company in 2012 [0]. The company already had a GPS-enabled dispatch system. The whole metropolitan area was split into 2 mile x 2 mile Zones. This was how fare dispatching worked from the drivers' POV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmm3kECLxw
@WrathOfGnon comments on traditional development. Ex: "The organic way of city growth: mature cities, rather than growing like a cancer out of their bounds and limits, send out colonies to form new ones. Léon Krier illustrated it thus: [...]" - https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1149093724137242624
Most of Phoenix was developed in the post-WWII period. Modern Phoenix is entirely dependent on cars and air conditioning. It's not very human-friendly.
If our dear leaders wanted to deal with the "transportation" problem, they'd start with the economic insecurity of those at the bottom, who are living from week to week. At the end of my taxi driving period (when my roommate was no longer paying their half of rent), I was driving for 2 weeks to make rent, then 2 weeks for the rest of my expenses.
If housing was built around "cooperatives", people's best financial option would be living in a compact environment where you don't need a car, rather than moving out into the suburbs & commuting 1 hour to work. But housing is an exercise in wealth concentration, where the only way for most of us to achieve stability is to participate in the lunacy of single-family-home ownership.
> The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone.
This is why I've never understood the taxi companies whining and complaining about Uber and Lyft breaking the rules. These companies could have done the exact same thing and crushed Uber and Lyft because they already had large presences in their city.
In many (maybe most) cities, there are regulations that taxis have to follow. If you want to drive a cab in NYC, you have to buy a medallion.
Uber simply ignored those regulations, and ran unlicensed taxicab operations. While taxicab companies were paying for limited numbers of medallions, charging fixed rates, etc., Uber was just doing whatever it wanted.
Even if you think the regulations don't make sense, you can see why the taxicab companies are upset.
No, what happened was that technology obsoleted the laws that said "A taxi is something you hail on the street". Even in NYC, there were car services predating Uber that you call and arrange a ride, and those drivers were not required to have medallions. The medallion was needed to pick up rides on the street.
With the advent of portable phones, cities did not update their regulations (which cities do?) and so Uber exploited this loophole to create a car service that you requested with your phone, but which had a similar (but not identical) user experience to hailing a cab. In fact, the first Ubers were designed as a car service -- it was higher end cars and the cheaper UberX happened only later.
Even today, you still can't hail an Uber. That would make it a taxi. Every ride is pre-arranged over the phone.
So it's not true that Uber just ignored the rules for taxis, because Ubers aren't taxis. They are a car service. It's the cities that missed the whole mobile phone phenomena and didn't update their laws.
In other words, Uber was a bit more sophisticated about this than "Let's just ignore the taxi laws" -- and understanding the difference is kinda important. I can join you in criticizing Uber, but they are not cartoonishly bad, and they did actually think these issues through.
This is the argument that Uber used in NYC, though its validity is highly questionable. In countless cities around the world, however, Uber's operations were blatantly illegal. Uber pretty effectively used its customer base to lobby local governments against enforcing regulations, though, and Uber's operations were legalized in many places.
> This is the argument that Uber used in NYC, though its validity is highly questionable
Why do you think it's questionable? This is really cut and dried, which is why NYC was unable to challenge Uber, as they had no case. Not liking something doesn't make it questionable.
> In countless cities around the world, however, Uber's operations were blatantly illegal
So examples would be nice here, at least in the U.S. I know of cases where cities decided to pass laws against Uber after they were established in the local market, in which case Uber obeyed those laws and pulled out, but of course lobbied to have the laws changed. Absolutely nothing about that sequence of events is "blatantly illegal".
Because standing at the curb and hailing a nearby car on an app is much more like sticking out your hand and waiving down a cab than it is like calling up a limo company the day before and booking a ride. "We're using an app" is not a good excuse for flooding the market with unlicensed taxicabs.
> So examples would be nice here, at least in the U.S.
Uber was considered illegal in NYC, SF and LA, and I'm sure many other cities. They eventually came to agreements with Uber, and Uber's operations were legalized by new legislation across the US. However, the initial strategy appears to have been to just expand everywhere, regardless of what they local regulations were, and then to get permission afterwards.
This didn't always work out that well internationally, at least at first. For example, Uber executives were arrested in France for running an unlicensed taxicab operation.
Addendum: Uber was apparently aware that its operations were illegal in many places, according to leaked internal documents from the company: [0]. I wasn't aware of just how brazen they were.
> Because standing at the curb and hailing a nearby car on an app is much more like sticking out your hand and waiving down a cab than it is like calling up a limo company the day before and booking a ride.
The law has to define what is a cab and a what is a car service in a way that doesn't rely on feelings and impressions, but in a rigorous way, and Uber met that law even if using Uber leaves you with the impression of a cab like experience.
In fact, Uber met it in such an obvious and clear manner that no city (at least no major US city) tried to go after Uber by claiming it was a taxi company. They went after Uber for arguing that workers were misclassified as contractors rather than employees, but not for being an unlicensed taxi. Your insistence that Uber was blatantly breaking this law then creates a puzzle -- why didn't the cities see this "blatant illegality"? Perhaps they didn't know their own city codes as well as you do -- you should have written them a letter and explained how it was obvious that Uber was in violation of their codes.
Also, the link you provide doesn't actually say that Uber was aware it was really a taxi company. It is mostly a collection of documents intended to portray Uber as having an offensive culture. How many indictments came out of those leaks? None.
> no city (at least no major US city) tried to go after Uber by claiming it was a taxi company
Many major cities did, including NYC, LA and SF. Regulators in all cities considered Uber to be operating illegally.
Those cities later came to agreements with Uber to allow it to operate, because there was enough support for Uber in the public.
> It is mostly a collection of documents intended to portray Uber as having an offensive culture.
Uber executives repeatedly admit that they're operating illegally, and tell their people in new jurisdictions to just press ahead and expand operations, regardless of what local regulators say. Their business model was to get big first and then to pressure governments to legalize their operations. That worked in most places.
> They went after Uber for arguing that workers were misclassified as contractors rather than employees
> The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art.
No, we already had taxi dispatch.
The innovation was in giving up on the strict numeric quota for how many taxis were allowed to exist.
NYC had quotas - "taxi medallions". Arizona had minimal regulations: vehicle safety inspections, meter accuracy, driver screening. The big taxi companies were mostly trusted to do their own regulatory compliance for their fleets and drivers. Anyone could start their own taxi company - I understood the state agency was quite helpful. I had no interest in making a career of transportation, so I just drove for the company enough to pay my bills, while I worked on my other endeavors.
> the mistake of building communities for cars instead of people
I’m a person, and the community I find most healthy to live in is one where I can walk out my front door, breath fresh air, experience nature, and am sufficiently isolated from my neighbors that we can largely do what we like without negatively impacting each other.
This requires a car, and single-family home ownership.
There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’d never voluntarily live in the kind of unhealthy sardine can city you desire.
What about a dense village or town, with nature nearby that you could walk to in 10 minutes?
I wonder if single family home communities might be nicer if the homes were clustered more closely together and surrounded by natural areas. But having only single family homes might not be dense enough to get the advantages that come with more density.
It's a real shame that zoning for single family homes, lot sizes, and parking requirements became so uniform across the country. It's not easy to do anything different. Making things worse the taxpayers in more dense areas end up subsidizing the infrastructure build-outs in less dense areas, through state taxes and grants [0], along with other car-related subsidies talked about in this thread paid for by all taxpayers.
Density brings advantages to industry, technology, labor markets, factories, and infrastructure in general, but I’m unconvinced it represents an advantage when we’re talking about the optimal size and density for healthy human communities, and the mental and physical health of the families that comprise them.
I personally benefit from having enough room that I can live independently, without the kind of constant oversight and strictures required to keep high-density environs operating.
I’d even suggest that this is almost universally true, and that density represents a cultural pathology in service of industrialization, not human beings.
That said, I won’t begrudge anyone the same right to live how they want; I merely take umbrage at the pervasive undercurrent of opinion that how I live is not just wrong, but that state authority and cultural power should be leveraged to coerce or force a more correct choice.
I'm not a fan of oversight and strictures myself, so I see where you are coming from. Cities can be challenging in that regard, but homeowner associations can be bad, also.
You mentioned density representing a cultural pathology in service of industrialization...
It's funny, I've thought of modern suburbs as being built for the convenience of developers, specifically the single-family single-use housing developments that have been so popular for new construction in the last several decades.
Regulations have kind of created a system favoring these very large developers who acquire cheap land on the outskirts of town, build only cookie cutter houses then walk away leaving people with nothing else to do nearby, no place to walk for a cup of coffee or a beer, or a corner store or library, friends from school are too far away for the kids to play with, the expense of one or more cars are required for each family, etc.
New housing seems to be built this way because it is the cheapest way for developers to turn a profit, and they don't care that it is unnaturally isolating for the people who live there.
I think there's already been too much state coercion in this matter for decades, zoning as described above. It's next to impossible to add an in-law cottage, or convert a house to a duplex, or site a tiny house in most places, or pocket neighborhoods, etc.
It's interesting that California is pushing to convert R1 to R3, allowing single family homes to be converted to triplexes. Other places are allowing accessory dwelling units. I'm a big fan of Japan's zoning, where everything is R3 minimum, with low-impact businesses also allowed in any residential building (with restrictions on height and setbacks). If you want more land with your house then you can buy the lot next door. They have neighborhoods with a variety of things to do, not just warehousing people far away from the rest of their lives.
It's illegal to build an apartment building in most lots. R1 Zoning mandates only single family housing be built. Parking minimums are another regulation that mandates that an enormous amount of parking be provided around each building. While easy & free parking is nice this makes an area unwelcoming once you dismount from your car.
There is a market failure in multiple dwelling unit construction. Noise isolation between residences is often low. You can hear your neighbors walking, their stereo systems, etc. That definitely needs to be fixed if more people are to willingly move closer in.
> Modern Phoenix is entirely dependent on cars and air conditioning. It's not very human-friendly.
What is with the obsession with air conditioning in Phoenix? New York is dependent on heat moreso than Phoenix is dependent on air conditioning. Does that make it “not very human friendly”?
People seem to think “air conditioning is evil technology” while simultaneously thinking “obviously we need heating to live in otherwise uninhabitable locations”.
> It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art.
This downplays the real-time and feedback mechanisms. Cab drivers behaved like grade A pieces of shit because there was no rating mechanism to encourage anything else.
You may have had GPS dispatch, but people couldn’t get a real time ETA nor was there any actual commitment to pick that person up.
My first time SCUBA diving was at Boy Scouts. I was 12 years old. The pool was only 3 or 4 feet deep, but they still gave a safety talk before turning us loose with tanks, regulators and buoyancy control devices: "never stop breathing". They told us that if we inhale at 3 feet below the water surface then stood up with our mouth closed, the air will expand in our lungs and cause a lot of damage to our lungs: barotrauma. All it takes is a constant stream of little bubbles to save your lungs from the changes in pressure.
The tragedy of our last 3 years is that if all our critical care doctors were trained in basic SCUBA diving, they would have known better than to have slapped people on ventilators for 'pneumonia', and would have known better than to treat patients' low blood oxygen saturation levels with supplemental oxygen.
This article covers the physics, but curiously doesn't use the terms: barotrauma and oxygen toxicity. Nitrogen washout is another problem experienced by people who breathe oxygen-enriched atmospheres. Not a problem for brief trips underwater, but a huge problem for patients kept on oxygen-enriched atmospheres for long period of time.
tl/dr: Breathing higher-than-atmospheric levels of oxygen will destroy your lungs (#OxygenToxicity), as will pressure differentials (#Barotrauma).
Medical Hyperventilation [0] is a medical tragedy. If only our doctors were all trained to be SCUBA divers.
After the first few months of using high-pressure differential ventilation on their pneumonia patients, doctors switched to using different ventilator management strategies. But they never issued a Mea Culpa [1].
The other problem experienced by patients treated by SCUBA-naive doctors is #OxygenToxicity. From the article:
>> But underwater, the problem is likely to be too much pressure. If the partial pressure of oxygen gets around 1.6 ATM, it can cause people to have convulsions.
Healthy people can tolerate a pure oxygen atmosphere for about 24 hours...
The third problem is nitrogen washout, where the nitrogen in patients' lungs was replaced with oxygen, leading to collapse of the air sacks.
I wrote a blog post about "Medical Hyperventilation", but it was too late, and I've no credentials to speak of. Oh well.
One of my more memorable encounters in my taxi was with an older fellow who was moving cars to sell at auction (in Scottsdale, Arizona).
"How'd you find your way to the desert?" Phoenix was half-way between the labs in Los Angeles, the labs in New Mexico, and the testing sites in Nevada.
For a young single man, life on the secret bases in Nevada was pretty sweet. All the meals were the same price (steak, lobster, etc), ammunition was cheap, etc. The married guys didn't like it so much, but he was not married at the time.
Ooohhhh... Interesting. There are rumors on the internet about the federal government having extensive underground infrastructure in the western United States. This made sense to me: if you want to hide something, you put it underground. So I asked my passenger about this.
"Oh yeah, but there's way more stuff underground at Area 12 [0], than at Area 51."
I'm partial to the idea that nothing important happens at Area 51 anymore, just your average everyday testing of the latest thermodynamics-compliant military hardware. All the interesting R&D is now done somewhere else.
Ingo Swann [1] said in his Art Bell interview (iirc), w.r.t. his self-published book [2], that the secret program he was involved with, which he couldn't prove, never even got to the point where it needed to be 'classified'.
I mean all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere. I never heard of Area 12 or any other "area" so those are still obscure enough for the mainstream.
> all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere.
It’s kinda law of nature, actually. If all media attention is on some spot, you can bet that much more “interesting” things are happening elsewhere. Like:
- college girl suffer less sexual abuse than non-college girls;
- Catholic kids suffer less sexual abuse from figures of authority than non-Catholic kids (by some probably biased reports - 10 times less);
- Uber implemented more safety features in their app than Lyft (which was recently sued by some women exactly for that) - here the causality link is obvious: with media attention on them, Uber was forced to try harder.
But less people would click on “Area 12”, than on “Area 51”, so it goes.
I always thought one of the more interestingly codenamed nuclear tests was Mission Cyber, the weapon effect portion of Operation Touchstone which was conducted at the Rainier Mesa test site. From what I can tell it was an investigation into the effects of an underground nuclear blast on various nearby electronic and fiber optic systems. But they couldn't have picked better names to fuel conspiracy theorists.
hah, thanks. It was inspired by one of Michael Crawford's [0] usernames at K$5 (kuro5hin.org), Zombie Jesus Christ. At first the other K5 users thought Taxi Cab Jesus was just trolling Michael. But really the point was to post diaries about my days in the taxi. I was focused on more than the bottom line, and spent a little extra time, as needed, to help my passengers through their days.
Mr. Crawford had aspirations to solve all the world's problems, and sometimes had a messiah complex. Mr. Crawford was brilliant (dropped out of CalTech), but troubled, on account of his poorly-treated mental illness. I visited him in the San Louis Obispo County Jail [1], because I was in the area and it was something B.J. (Biblical Jesus) said to do.
Presumably none of the groundbreaking / fun research is carried out at Area 51 anymore.
If you were a research scientist doing classified research, and invented anti-gravity, would the powers behind the scenes allow this technology into circulation? Our guys certainly wouldn't want to let the Soviets know anti-grav is a possibility.
All the U.S. military-industrial complex's best toys are certainly still classified.
If they’ve invented a doomsday device, however, letting the Soviets know should be a top priority for it to function as a deterrent (per Dr. Strangelove’s logic).
I always got the sense that it's a mistake to switch to lithium-powered vehicles, for anything more than a "proof-of-concept" number of early adopters.
The tragedy of our era is designing communities for cars instead of people.
The article is sort-of interesting, but it opens by rewriting history:
> In March 2020, New York City’s hospitals filled up with patients desperately ill with Covid-19. In many cases, when their fluid-filled lungs could no longer give them oxygen, doctors sedated them and put them on ventilators.
> The patients who recovered were taken off the machines and anesthesia. Within a day or so, their doctors expected them to wake up.
In March 2020 doctors were slapping all the patients with poor blood oxygen saturation levels on ventilators. Around March 31st, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell posted his rebellion video [0] to Youtube, whereby he questioned his profession's rush to ventilate 'virus' patients who weren't actually in respiratory distress.
Ventilations promptly fell off a cliff, and the virus became survivable.
In the real world, Medicine had already figured out that ventilation is a terrible treatment for pneumonia. Our doctors should have known better than to follow the WHO's guidance.
Ingo Swann helped design the United States' threat analysis of the Soviets' bio-information transfer program. Swann was an artist who'd made a name for himself as a parapsychological research subject in NYC.
Swann covered Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinskiy's formative experience in the opening pages of his posthumously-published book, Psychic Literacy [1] (Kazhinskiy is the subject of this Atlas Obscura submission.):
> I. The Psychic Renaissance Begins
> In 1923, IN THE NEWLY-formed Soviet Union, a psychic Event took place in a most unlikely situation. Yet, insofar as anything that affects human affairs can be said to have beginnings, it commenced a new epoch regarding what we in the United States call psychical or parapsychological research.
> For forty-six years the meaning of this Event remained almost completely unappreciated in the United States -- until, in 1969, its implications began to be grasped within an aura of disbelief. What this Event was, along with its enormous impact, takes some explaining. But in a precise sense, it cracked open a special door to a different kind of future -- a door whose existence had long been suspected by some, but hotly debated by the many.
> This first Event, and others analogous to it that were to follow, eventually came to have what we like to call "great implications." The vista of these implications is now widening. They have begun to change our human image, our conception of our collective potential, and the nature of our immediate and distant future.
> In retrospect, why the 1923 Soviet Event remained cloaked in obscurity as far as American comprehensions are concerned is understandable. Frankly speaking, Americans were not at all prepared to expect that psychic matters would ever take on anything other than fringe meaning. Thus, at the time, it certainly would not have been possible to assess this obscure Event as one that was destined to aim world society toward a future in which psychic matters woud take on fundamental importance. But unquestionably it did so, and thus it is of great interest to understand the how and why.
> The Tiflis Event
> In 1919, IN THE CITY of Tiflis (later called Tbilisi) in the Georgian S.S.R., there lived a man named Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinski During August of that year, his best friend fell ill of a fatal disease diagnosed as typhus. One night during the death crisis Kazhinski, was suddenly awakened out of a deep sleep by a noise that sounded like a silver spoon striking glass. In vain he looked for what might have caused this sound.
> The next afternoon, he learned his friend had died during the night. Arriving at the dead man's house to pay his respects, he noticed a glass with a silver spoon in it on the night table next to the bed in which the corpse was laid out. Seeing him studying these objects the dead man's mother burst anew into tears. She explained that she had been about to give her son his medicine, but at the very moment she put the spoon to his lips he died, and she had dropped the spoon into the empty glass. When the mother demonstrated just how she had done this Kazhinski heard the exact sound that had awakened him at the very moment his friend had died -- even though their mutual homes were a mile apart.
> Kazhinski was very moved and excited. How was it possible that the tone had communicated itself to him across such a distance and awakened him from a deep sleep? Kazhinski, a confirmed materialist, had no time for "superstition", but, apparently, he was a man who could acknowledge a strange fact drawn from his own experience. So, on that August day he vowed he would solve the mystery of what had linked his own mind with that of the mother and the dying friend.
> In order to fulfill his vow, Kazhinski began to study the human nervous system under the famous scientist Alexander Vassilievitch Leontivich and became an electro-technologist specializing in studying the electrical nature of the human nervous system. By 1923 he had collected facts and had concluded that the human nervous system can react, by means unknown, to stimuli not accessible to the normal five senses. In 1923 he published his findings in a book entitled Thought Transference. The book interested a number of Soviet scientists -- and, in this way, a new epoch in psychic research began.
As @rolph links below, oxygen is toxic at higher partial pressures.
I have an acquaintance who went to the hospital within 24 hours of her first hyperbaric treatment. She was coughing up blood, iirc: "I warned you about this, don't do that again."
The antidote for oxygen toxicity is somewhat therapeutic, beyond neutralizing the toxic effects of O2.
My first taxi passenger in 2012 was a woman going for outpatient surgery. Her Medicaid plan was paying for the transportation. The company’s computer system kept track of her fare.
In the old days the “voucher” fares were on paper slips. Most the hospitals and clinics switched to the taxi company’s electronic systems by the late 2000’s, but we still saw a few of the old paper vouchers… one of my more memorable fares was a woman going home from the hospital with a paper voucher. She’d taken herself to the ER on account of her monthly misery. They gave her pain medicine, as if that would help her financial situation, or her PTSD from childhood abuse.
Nothing unique about Uber and Lyft having contracts.
Lots of you are cheerleaders for "renewables". They seem like a transitional technology to me. If hydrocarbons are ever going to be retired from use, nuclear sure does seem like the only option.
It seems to me like humanity's only hope is a breakthrough in our understanding of the laws of nature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_King...
edit: formatting & added combined 11% total for wind/solar