Comments by "JohnDoe" (@JohnDoe-my5ip) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

  1. We really need to impose something akin to the PE Exam and licensing onto software engineering. There needs to be accountability. You can’t move fast and break things when designing bridges. Why can you do it when designing information systems that modern life increasingly depends on?
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  2. I JUST NEEEEED ONE MORE PARAMETER BRO. ONE MORE PARAMETER WILL FIX IT I SWEAR!
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  3. People would’ve said the same thing about lithium ion batteries and EVs 20 years ago. Hydrogen’s energy density is excellent. I’m still not convinced electrified semi trucks and airplanes will be feasible without hydrogen fuel cells. But only time will tell.
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  4. @johnzach2057 it’s not a firmware issue… traditional American central air systems can’t be used as heat pumps because there is no reversing valve. The system was designed to go one way. I’m sure the compliant UK heat pump systems are also designed as one way systems, just flowing in reverse. A firmware fix alone won’t unlock your system.
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  5. MBAs have been running American universities for decades now, and those people really do believe planning more than 3 months out is for commies. It’s been an unmitigated disaster. German bureaucracy is infamously inefficient but the last thing you want is to run it like a business. And you definitely don’t want to take inspiration from a thieving oligarch who sieg heil’ed twice at the inauguration.
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  6. Europeans love to trash talk American stick built houses, but at least we don’t think brick is adequate insulation! Our codes require at least R-13 for walls. Your uninsulated brick wall is R-1 if you’re lucky. Heat pumps are the wrong solution for old existing homes in Northern Europe IMO. At least, as long as yall insist on using coal instead of nuclear energy… the retrofit is absurdly expensive, usually only done here to add central air. Heat pumps have the advantage here of not needing both a furnace and an air conditioner. The coolants are extremely potent greenhouse gases in their own right, and sometimes leak. I wish more effort was placed into deploying more municipal district heating systems than these suburban style single-home heat pumps… in areas where most people heat with radiators, wouldn’t it be much simpler to just hook the radiators up to a new hot water source, than completely gut everyone’s homes? District heating could use geothermal source heat pumps and spread the cost of the well across an entire neighborhood. Air source heat pumps are inherently far less efficient.
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  7. “AI” has already killed thousands of disabled people by imposing austerity on them when they were entitled to benefits. Theres a book detailing it, called Weapons of Math Destruction. It was published 8 years ago. So theyre really just predicting a continuation of the status quo.
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  8. Wireless transmission of orbital solar power is completely unworkable in practice, IMO. Unless you’re trying to create a microwave weapon. I was thinking maybe a sneaker net system would work. After all, no network can beat the bandwidth of a Honda Civic full of hard drives going 75mph on the interstate (the latency is a bit poor though). You’d just need a way to move a battery with an energy density greater than 15 kWh/kg to overcome gravitational potential energy. Perhaps with a space elevator. Good news! Hydrogen is 33 kWh/kg. Bad news! You gotta bring up 9 kg of water to yield 1kg hydrogen. And it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever beat the energy density of hydrogen. Well so much for that.
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  9. At least in the USA, it’s more complicated than that. Finding a HVAC contractor who isn’t a MAGA chud that foams at the mouth at the mention of heat pump, is easier said than done in many northern states. We’re stuck with lousy domestic offerings, made by lazy entitled Texan companies for their local climate. Your current gen tech won’t be available in the USA for at least a decade. The government regulators are captured completely by the AC manufacturers. They mandate the use of extremely inefficient and archaic HFCs from the 1990s, so that our local capitalist swine doesn’t have to compete.
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  10. Allowing monopolies to exist because they are large enough to run bell labs leads to far greater systemic inefficiencies than funding a bell labs with public money. The damage done by monopolies is just more insidious
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