Youtube comments of Peter Lund (@peterfireflylund).
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There's another reason or two, Harvey, that I didn't go into earlier because I was on my iPad.
1) we have small gas peaker plants now.
2) we have decent megabatteries now and they are only going to get bigger, better, and cheaper. Thank you, consumer electronics! Thank you, electric cars! Megabatteries can replace (and are already replacing) some of the peaker plants. In the long run, we might be able to get rid of all of them.
3) we have better and cheaper power electronics now. We have transistors that work with much higher voltages and much higher currents. They are really useful for EVs but they are also really useful for turning photovoltaic power into DC for battery charging or into 110 (120)/220 (240) volt AC for the grid -- or for going from grid power to DC battery charging power. The losses are much smaller now and they are much more reliable. They are also really useful for transforming electricity up/down, even without using AC. That means we can start using HVDC cables instead of HVAC -- the losses in HVDC are smaller, especially if they are in the ground or under water.
4) we have small, cheap computers everywhere + we have internet everywhere. That makes it easy to keep track of more details of the grid in real-time + it makes it realistic to turn off certain loads in a smart way when the total load on the grid is too high. Perhaps there are big freezers that can be turned off for a while with no harm, for example.
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IQ has got surprisingly much to do with everything.... how long you live and how healthy you will be in old age, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies
"Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability", Linda Gottfredson
Furthermore, dyslexia is sometimes defined as being worse at reading and writing than expected given one's IQ. Writing and reading ability follow IQ pretty well.
On top of all that -- which isn't nice reading -- intelligence is large genetic, provided the environment is "good enough". That isn't yet the case everywhere in the world so there is some hope for the world outside of Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America.
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Who on Earth said that they were white European? Nobody did :)
Hindi, Gujarati, and the other modern Northern Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit -- or rather, the kind of Sanskrit that common people spoke and not so much the highly standardized formal form of Sanskrit that Pāṇini described/invented. This is no different than how French/Spanish/Italian/Romanian are derived more from the common man's vulgar Latin than from the highly standardized prestige form of Latin that Cicero and Caesar wrote in.
So where did Sanskrit come from? Was it invented one afternoon around teatime? Was it a purely Indian invention that took place in India?
No. The predecessor to Sanskrit was brought into India from the North West -- and it was very similar to the language that evolved to become Persian.
The common ancestor to that -- and to languages like Latin, Greek, Albanian (all very different and separated for thousands of years) and the Germanic and Slavic languages came (roughly) from an area in South-East Ukraine and a bit further East from that (the Pontic steppes).
Nobody is saying that Europeans invaded India. Nobody -- except bonkers Indian nationalists -- is saying that Indians invaded Europe. What they are saying is that lots places were invaded by a people that originally (as far back as we know) came from the Pontic steppes.
This was pretty obvious a long time ago just from archeology and linguistics -- and the way people looked. Shared elements in mythologies and religions also strengthened the hypothesis. We didn't know exactly where the original home of the protoindoeuropeans was but the Pontic steppes were always one of the leading candidates.
Now we have even more confirmation of all this through the use of ancient DNA -- they literally look at tiny pieces of DNA in tiny bits of old skeletons and compare them! How cool is that?
These (rather brutal and nasty) guys were our common ancestors, unless you are entirely Dravidian, in which case it is only large parts of your culture that came from them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamna_culture
Btw, we have lots of really, really, really old Indo-European writing -- not just in (old!) Latin or (even older) Greek. We also have some so old that it predates not only the Latin, Greek, and the Brahmic script. It is so old that it even predates Linear B! It is written in cuneiform on clay tablets + we have toponyms, personal names, and loanwords in writing in non-Indo-European languages that are even older. We really have a lot of material to base the Indo-European hypothesis on.
We don't know whether the Indus valley civilization crashed because of the, let's face it, barbarian Aryan invasion(s) or whether the Aryan invasion(s) were made possible because of the crash of Indus valley civilization. All we really know for sure is that there is a curious coincidence in the timelines.
Northern Europe was not well developed during the time of the Indus valley civilization. The Hittites and Luwians seem to have been quite advanced, though.
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@darqv9358 but you are not “dust bowl in the 30’s” poor, are you?
You have clothes, shoes, soap, clean running water, a toilet, probably at least a shower, a fridge/freezer, a microwave, a stove, a smartphone, a pretty good sound system (maybe headphones+phone only), easy cheap/free access to almost all the good music humanity ever made, plates, knives, forks, spoons, access to a library, access to healthcare (even if you believe you don’t)… and probably a car.
Most middle class people in China don’t have all that. Most people in history didn’t. Most people in the US didn’t just a few decades ago.
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Actually, a lot of us would welcome the UK back. The UK was very good at saying no to wasting money on Club Med or financing crazy French prestige projects.
Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Slovenia would all love to have an ally again when it comes to budget restraints. Germany? Don't know yet. Their new government might be crazy. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece won't be happy about the UK rejoining, though.
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@kngharv Yes. But when you zoom in, some of those incremental improvement are not that simple. There are lots of total shifts of technology in delimited areas. The improved power electronics did not come about because power MOSFETs became better (which they did) but because of a different type of "transistor", the IGBT. And that's just one example. If you zoom out, it looks like incremental improvement but if you zoom in, you can see it is a new technology which happens to share most of its "ecosystem" with preexisting semiconductors and which is compatible with preexisting electronics.
Here's some background reading...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulated-gate_bipolar_transistor
(just look at the table if you are in a hurry)
Our grids are AC for one reason only: it makes it a lot easier and cheaper to transform the electricity down from high voltages (and low currents) to lowish voltages and high currents close to the consumers. The power lines are really just very, very long resistors and the loss in a resistor is proportional to the current. The power (energy per unit of time) equals the voltage times the current, so if we can step the voltage up and the current down, we get lower losses. Transformers are good at this job but they require alternating current. Other methods have been used, for example electric motors that drive dynamos, but they are not as efficient. With modern power electronics, we finally have something that can do it better than transformers and without the alternating current.
HVDC is useful for transmitting electricity with smaller losses = it's practical go much longer distances + underwater in more cases than before. The DC part also means that the connected subgrids don't have to be synchronized, which they do for AC. That's a huge deal. It makes it much less risky to connect up gigantic powernets because the risk of cascade failures is much lower. And we want our nets to become bigger because wind and sun are intermittent power sources but hopefully the wind will be blowing somewhere and the sky will be clear *somewhere*. It also makes it easier to use pumped storage for "peak shaving" -- pumped storage usually requires mountains and low population densities but the usefulness requires industry/cities. Better electronics (computers) and communication (internet) also makes it easier to keep synchronized grids running.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
We have a big connected grid in Europe and we are trying to make it bigger (but less synchronized):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Europe
Pumped storage: big lakes (possibly artificial) at high elevations + a big height drop + turbines that can turn into pumps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
It's currently the best/cheapest energy storage method but it is not feasible everywhere + we have more or less built what we can in the West and some of them do have a local environmental impact.
Other options for energy storage is batteries, of which lithium-ion is clearly the technology to bet on. Lead iron used to be cheaper (and might still be cheaper for a couple of years more) but lead is really unpleasant whereas lithium-ion batteries are safe enough to put in landfills (but can also be recycled).
Lithium-ion have had a superior energy density for a long time but the prices have been too high, particularly when taking the low cycle count into account. Every single charge-discharge cycle wears a little on the battery and lithium-ion used to have a limit of a few hundred cycles. This has been improved immensely in recent years, mainly through the use of better additives. The technological enabler for this was a better measurement device that could measure microscopic wear on a battery over a single cycle. It's basically a really, really, really good amp meter. Prior to that, researchers had to perform many(!) cycles in order to compare their additives.
This device was developed in Jeff Dahn's lab at Dalhousie University:
https://www.dal.ca/diff/dahn/about.html
There's a reason why Tesla has been working closely with him for about a decade...
Tesla sells huge batteries commercially and expect that part of its business to grow a lot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack
Tesla had a "Battery Day" event last year to tell investors about their battery technology, both current and upcoming. The press mostly ignored it but they showed several things that will change the world because they promise to make lithium-ion batteries much cheaper to produce (and also better than they are now).
The official stream (140 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6T9xIeZTds
Much shorter version (16 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK79ioBW8Mg
The main competition for lithium-ion batteries for the grid is flow batteries. Unfortunately, they tend to use big tanks of really nasty chemicals (which may have to be heated to work properly). They are also unlikely to be able to compete with future lithium-ion batteries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
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@CheeseOfMasters on average, yes. Even within the same ethnicities and families, because there is a (small) environmental influence on IQ. Most of the effect is due to genetics, of course. As for the environment, it really matters that a child grows up without malnutrition. It’s really bad to grow up with an iodine insufficiency, for example. That’s exactly why we add iodine to salt in large parts of the world. That, and the physical effects of severe iodine deficiency can be really nasty. Other negative effects are from diseases and parasites. It really matters that the water is clean, that we have vaccines against measles, that the food is clean, and that people (mostly) wash their hands.
But I am sure you sat down and studied all this before you got on your high horse, didn’t you?
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Perhaps you should read up on China’s history? The real history, not that of the CCP or Chinese nationalists or western Communists.
Europe did NOT plunder China’s resources. China was incredibly badly managed. Europe transferred lots of very useful tech to China. Europe also gave China better courts, more rule of law, better taxation, a postal service, access to world markets, better administration, railways, better roads, better ships, better houses, medicine that actually works, glass factories (that the Chinese elite smashed several times), etc.
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@VFAHSN It's a bit dishonest to leave some important information out...
This is a very new rule, from Jan 2019. And not everybody has to wait until the age of 67. You could have mentioned Opzione Donna, APE Sociale, and Quota 100. You could also have mentioned the ability to retire (regardless of age) after roughly 42-43 years of social security payments.
You could also have provided some information on the average retirement age which is far from 67. Because of the existence of various early retirement schemes in many countries, the average retirement age is usually a bit lower than the official retirement age.
There are spreadsheets available here with average retirement age for OECD countries from 1970-2018:
https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/average-effective-age-of-retirement.htm
The current averages for Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, The Netherlands: 63.5, 65.1, 64.3, 65.2, 66.4 (averages of 2013-18).
The current average for Italy: 62.4 (average of 2012-17), 63.3 (average of 2013-18).
I'd say the Frugal Four (+ Finland) have a point...
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The whole world did -- and then forgot it again because it happened so long ago and it really isn't anything special anymore. The US has had massive radio antennas like this for 50+ years. The same with the Soviet Union (then)/Russia (now). The same with ESA. There are even commercial networks like this you can buy time on.
Which brings me to the next point: China needs more than just a bunch of these antennas in Northern China. The problem is that the Earth rotates... So they really need at least three groups of big antennas spread around the globe.
The US has that. Russia has that. ESA has that. Several commercial companies have that.
They were used for the Apollo missions, for the Soviet robotic missions to the moon, for the missions to Mars and Venus, for the Voyager probes, for New Horizons (the probe that flew by Pluto in 2015), for the many asteroid and comet missions from the US, Europe, and Japan, etc, etc... NASA/ESA/ROSCOSMOS (Russia/ISRO (India) currently have active observation satellites in orbit around Mars -- how do you think they communicate with them?
So: they aren't really anything special. Everybody else already have them. China doesn't have enough to be self-reliant. China could just have bought antenna time commercially or they could ask NASA/ESA/Russia nicely about borrowing their antennas -- which they will have to do anyway.
Full networks (NASA/ESA/Russia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESTRACK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Deep_Space_Network
Small networks, basically a single station each + borrowed/rented stations (India, Japan, China):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Deep_Space_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Telemetry,_Tracking_and_Command_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuda_Deep_Space_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Deep_Space_Network
Satellites around Mars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_orbiters
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If the Republic of India is a country, then so is the European Union.
It looks a lot like a country with laws ("directives"), a parliament, a court, a government ("commission"), a president, ministries ("directorates-general"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutions_of_the_European_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agencies_of_the_European_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_Service#Directorates-General
It sort of has a foreign policy, including embassies (that are called "representations" because the EU is totally not a country):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Foreign_and_Security_Policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_the_European_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_External_Action_Service
Note how the US, Russia, India and China all have a super important embassy in Brussels that just happens to be really, really big? And that there is a big and important "representation" in Washington, Moscow, New Delhi, and Beijing as well?
The EU military is not entirely coordinated yet. Almost all of it is under national control -- but that was also the case in Germany when WWI started (Germany then consisted of 25+ states/territories/cities) and we would definitely call Imperial Germany a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Military_Staff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Battlegroup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_European_Union
Satellite support is really important these days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Satellite_Centre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency#EU_and_the_European_Space_Agency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESTRACK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicus_Programme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
Practically all the satellite/space stuff is dual-use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
France et al are still keeping some of the spy sat technology to themselves (but will undoubtedly share info with the rest of EU if need be):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_(satellite)
Pleiades is just one example.
And there is the money:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro#Direct_and_indirect_usage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurozone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Central_Bank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_System_of_Central_Banks
We even have vassals/protectorates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Representative_for_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Police_Mission_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUFOR_Althea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Special_Representative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Rule_of_Law_Mission_in_Kosovo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Interim_Administration_Mission_in_Kosovo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_operations_of_the_European_Union
Actually, I think the EU is probably more of a country these days than India is.
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Nathanael Sallhag Eriksson -- not every country looks like Sweden.
Berlin has its own government, Bruxelles has its own government. Åland has home rule.
Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales have their own parliaments but they are still part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation#European_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_state
The European Union didn't start out as a country and it may not yet quite be one but it has been moving in that direction since its founding. Everybody knows that many of its citizens (maybe even the majority) don't like that so they stick to a polite fiction that the EU is totally not a country. Real countries have flags (oops), laws (oops), courts (oops), military (oops), foreign policies (oops), environmental protection agencies (oops), central banks (oops), passports (oops), ...
But we don't have stamps! ;)
You rightly say that we don't have an official language/a common language (two different things). But a) countries do not need to have official languages. The USA doesn't have one. And they can have more than one (Switzerland, Belgium, South Africa, India, etc.).
It is also quite normal for federated states to have decentralized education -- the US Department of Education wasn't founded until 1979, for example.
It is also quite normal for countries to have areas/territories in which not all laws apply -- Svalbard is an obvious example for Norway. That all EU member states have various opt outs and special cases doesn't mean that EU law isn't a thing.
It is also quite normal to have separatist movements in countries. Think of the Scottish National Party and the referendum they had in 2014. Northern Ireland had a long low intensity civil war about independence. Corsica, the Basque country,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_independence_referendum,_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
This list is not entirely serious -- Bornholm does not have a serious independence movement -- but it is a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Europe
Finally, there is no hard and fast rule about one to one correspondence between countries and currencies. The real world is far more complicated than that.
China consists of mainland China (using the yuan/renminbi), Macau (Macanese pataca), and Hong Kong (Hong Kong dollar).
There are countries with an official currency but with widespread use of US dollars and/or Euros (Zimbabwe!). There are also countries in which different territories nominally use different currencies which Just Happen to have a 1:1 exchange rate (kroner in Denmark/Greenland/Faroe Islands, 117 different kinds of pounds for the UK and dependencies).
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Pezfeo -- there are many click sounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language#Consonants
"Xhosa is rich in uncommon consonants. Besides pulmonic egressive sounds, which are found in all spoken languages, it has 18 clicks (in comparison, Juǀ'hoan, spoken by roughly 10,000 people in Botswana and Namibia, has 48 clicks, and Taa, with roughly 4,000 speakers in Botswana, has 83 click sounds, the largest consonant inventory of any known language). Also, Xhosa has ejectives and an implosive. Although 15 of the clicks also occur in Zulu, they are used less frequently than in Xhosa."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
"Xhosa is written with the Latin alphabet. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: c for dental clicks, x for lateral clicks and q for post-alveolar clicks (for a more detailed explanation, see the table of consonant phonemes below). Tones are not normally indicated in writing."
So, c/x/q indicate clicks in Xhosa... and each one represents several different click sounds...
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Yes, there is such an app! Actually, there are several but the best one is probably Skritter (which comes in two versions: one for Chinese and one for Japanese). You are continuously tested on tones, meanings/translations, and on how to write characters (stroke order and direction is fixed and important). The fixed stroke order makes it easier to learn the characters because you combine two systems: visual memory and motor memory.
There is a system to the madness but it is not as much of a shortcut as one would think. Many characters have one or more semantic components (simpler characters that each mean something) and one or more phonetic components (simpler characters that once sounded somewhat like the composite character). That helps a lot once you have learned the first few hundred characters.
The first hundred or so characters are probably the hardest to learn because you don't know anything about what you should pay attention to and what you can ignore + you don't know which characters are similar or how they combine into more complicated characters. It's just like how it took time to learn the difference between 'd' and 'b' and 'p' and 'q' (and 'O' and 'Q') when you were 6 years old.
Pleco is a really good dictionary app that lets you look up multi-character words, individual characters, the constituent parts of each character, etc.
If you are an absolute beginner, you shouldn't start out by learning lots of characters. HelloChinese is a very good app for beginners -- apart from all the standard language learning stuff you expect in an app, it also has speech recognition so you can get the tones and all the difficult new consonants right. Lingodeer is a new app for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean which also has speech recognition (but not as good as what HelloChinese has). It is so new that the iPhone version isn't out yet but the Android version is very nice (and it works well on the quite under powered Samsung Galaxy J1 -- I have the old version with 512MB RAM and a dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 running Android 4.4.4).
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But huge debts during wars and times of existential crises are normal. What is not normal is that they persisted in Greece.
Denmark went bankrupt in 1813 (Napoleonic Wars) and the economy sucked for the next couple of decades and lots of poor people starved to death. Germany went through hell several times (Napoleonic Wars, 1848, WW1, Weimar, hyperinflation, the Nazis, the occupation). France had severe economic problems during its many, many expensive wars. The US had enormous debts after its tax revolt that went too far (their war of independence). Occasional huge debts and occasional state defaults are the norm, unfortunately.
I think a better answer is given by looking at the Greek constitution and comparing it with other European constitutions. When one does that, one is invariably struck by the extreme level of political mistrust codified in the Greek constitution. Part of that seems to be due to the unresolved tensions after the civil war, after which the Communists ended up entirely unpunished and entirely free to operate, vote, and own property.
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It's actually even worse than that. Every step of the way, Greece was forced to promise to do something eminently sensible in return for the next bailout, and every step of the way, Greece dragged its feet, refused to implement part of the deal or even tore down something that had already been implemented.
An example is the way unemployment benefits works (or worked -- I'm not up to date with the situation). The old system required people to show receipts for their expenditures which they would then get reimbursed for. This is an extremely slow and inefficient process (but it requires lots of public sector workers!) and it doesn't let poor people manage their money wisely, for example by saving up for bigger expenses (that could even be investments in a better future) and it gives no incentive to poor people to find cheaper alternatives.
So it is not a good option for the people on unemployment benefits and it is expensive.
But on the other hand, it means the ruling party can find lots of jobs for people who are friendly to the party. And those people also have a chance to be nice to people they know (or somebody else with the right guanxi knows) and less nice to people they don't like.
Early on, Greece was forced by the EU to implement a small scale experiment where people just got a lump sum every month, just like they do in Northern Europe. It's cheap, fast, efficient, provides better incentives for the recipients, and makes it harder to cheat the tax payers.
One of the first things Syriza did was to scrap the experiment.
There are many, many more examples like that.
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Robert Thomas, no it has not peaked yet. There's still a lot that can be done with additives -- and since it was only about two years ago that good measurement equipment for test cells was developed, we should expect development of those additives (and other parts of lithium ion cells) to progress much faster now.
Additives help with temperature sensitivity, charging speed, heat losses during charging, and the number of cycles the cell can handle.
The density can be improved not only by using thinner layers in the cell (it's basically a rolled up very long and thin flat battery) but also by using finer carbon grains for one of the electrodes and by the use of additives again. It can also be improved by adding small amounts of silicon -- this is something Tesla and Panasonic have already started to do but there are good reasons to expect them to gradually raise it from a few percent to 20-30% of the carbon. There are problems with silicon but additives can probably solve some of them.
Jeff Dahn, Dalhouisie University, and his group have really pushed the limits of how well charging and discharging can be measured. It turns out that they can get information from a few charge/discharge cycles (or even just a single cycle) that previously took hundreds of cycles to get. That makes it much faster and cheaper to develop battery improvements.
The point of improving the energy density is not so much to make the batteries smaller as to make them cheaper: if you can get more bang out of the same materials you don't need as much of them, which makes same-size batteries cheaper.
Current lithium-ion batteries take a long time to produce (weeks or at the very least days), mostly due to a "maturation" period after the production proper where they are put through a special charge cycle (or several charge/discharge cycles) while their temperatures are raised in a specific way. If they can make that faster, they can make cheaper cells. Again, this seems to be something that can be handled with additives -- and it looks like something Dahn's group has looked into. They have published papers that almost say something about this but I expect the actual information to be proprietary to Tesla. Other groups have their own ultra-precise charging monitors (commercialized by people who used to be in Dahn's group) so they are very likely doing their own research into this as we speak.
So, to sum up:
- they are likely to become more energy dense, which is not particularly important by itself
- they are likely to become faster to charge
- they are likely to become both more cold tolerant and more heat tolerant
- they are likely to waste less energy in the form of heat while charging
- they are likely to be able to handle a higher number of cycles
- they are likely to become faster to produce
- they are likely to become cheaper. Much cheaper.
Your Jetta is going to remain cheaper for some time -- perhaps more than a decade -- but EV cars are going to become cheap enough that their other upsides outweigh the price in perhaps a decade for many people. Probably for almost everybody in two decades. And to get back to the original subject: this limits how much effort it is worth putting into improving small combustion engines.
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Jack, they had really damn good engineering and science. They also had a damn good production apparatus and they had lots of natural resources within their own borders.
They had a fantastic General Staff and they had a much better officer corps, everybody could read and write the same language (even including all the minorities in the fringes of Germany), and soldiers were allowed and expected to do much more thinking of their own in the field. It was much less top down than in the other countries involved in those wars.
They were also smart enough to use lots and lots of subs.
(Well, that arguably cost them dearly in the first war, where they sank a British ship carrying munitions and some American civillians -- despite an organized campaign in US papers to warn people off -- which was used as a pretext for the US to join the war openly. The ship was a legitimate target according to international law at the time, but the law also said that the Germans were supposed to try and save the people on board, which was completely unrealistically to do with a sub.)
On the other hand, they were dumb enough to waste an enormous amount of money, manpower, and precious materials on the V-2 project which had very little military value as long as one couldn't pack a decent bomb into it -- and one couldn't, until the nuclear bomb had been not only invented but miniaturized a bit. The V-2 project was bigger and more expensive than the Manhattan Project, so if the Germans had gone for that instead...
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@CheeseOfMasters “I do have some idea about these topics” and “simply put, a false statement” don’t really match, given that the reality is that IQ is largely genetic and that (of course) different populations have different average IQs. Of course, because their evolutionary pressure haven’t been the same. Of course, because their genetic bottle necks have been different. Of course, because they haven’t had the same mutations. And, of course, those differences have been measured. Many, many times. Across more than a century. We also know many of the genes involved, but nowhere near enough to predict individual IQ well from a DNA test. We can predict it, but only poorly.
This has been scientifically studied since the late 1800’s and the science simply doesn’t match your prejudice. Sorry, but I’m on team science.
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@thinkpolhub maybe, but Nigerian-Nigerians are not doin so well. Looking at immigrants is a statistical cheat because of selective migration (and Nigerian-Americans aren’t doing nearly as well as you think). There is a limit to the usefulness of education. If it really worked, we would have incredibly skillful people in the West with the percentage of people we put through college… but we don’t. We exhausted the talent reserve decades ago.
Learning reading, writing, ‘rithmetic is extremely useful. Learning a common language, be it English, French, Portuguese, Swahili, Mandarin, or the standard dialect of a language one already speaks, is extremely useful. After that, we quickly hit diminishing returns.
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@autarchyan5426 maybe a job at Novo for you? Plenty of engineering companies in and around Copenhagen for her. Sjælland is very lopsided: the Western/Southern parts are rural, the Eastern/Northern parts are not. The richest part is what we call Nordsjælland but it is really the Northeastern part. Houses are expensive there compared to just outside that part. Some areas there are not as nice as one would expect because of homegrown lower class people and imported people. An example is Nivå, which has a large bad area because a (Conservative) mayor wanted to do good 40-50 years ago and built cheap houses. It’s quite close to Hørsholm (an expensive, posh city) and the Nivå problems sometimes spillover to there.
Maybe look for a place outside the expensive region and commute by car. There are good websites about houses/flats, what to do and expect as an immigrant here, public services, tax rules, laws in general, jobs, etc.
Good luck, wherever you go (except Russia).
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The really interesting question would not be whether they (re)joined France, The Netherlands, and Germany or even the Brussels Question. No, the real question is who would be the lucky guys who got to keep all the cultural enrichment!
"We have the higher GDP per capita, so you need the diversity and enrichment the most."
"No, they would prefer to live with you and all the good tax payers."
"No, you should get them. Their culture and political values are closer to yours."
"But you need the diversity more. You don't even speak French, so you aren't diverse enough."
"What are you talking about? We speak Dutch, English, French, and German. You only speak French. You need the diversity more."
etc., etc. etc.
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"Renewables" are precisely the problem. Wind/solar sources vary widely in how much electricity they produce and that can only partially be predicted. Something else needs to produce electricity when they don't -- and that something else has to be cheap and ready to turn on/off at a moment's notice. That something else is gas -- via pipelines, not LNG. Gas in pipelines is cheap, LNG is not.
If we had relied on nuclear instead, we wouldn't be having this problem.
Or if we had allowed fracking in Europe, we wouldn't be having this problem.
And if we had relied more on electricity for heating and less on gas, we would be having a much smaller problem (in the near future when winter comes). It is more energy efficient to burn gas at a power plant and drive a heat pump with it than it is to burn gas at the consumer's house to generate heat.
If we had great energy storage (in terms of humongous amounts of cheap, long-lasting batteries), we wouldn't be in this mess and renewables would work really well without pipelined gas. It will unfortunately take a couple of decades before we can manufacture that many (let alone do it cheap enough).
Some European countries, due to accidents of geography, have mountains and valleys of a form that don't lend themselves well to agricultural purposes (=> low population density) while lending themselves excellently to hydropower (with pumps to move water up into the reservoirs). Those countries can use their reservoirs as de facto batteries (this is called "pumped storage"). Which are those countries? Basically only really Norway, Wales, and Scotland. Small parts of other countries can do it as well -- and they often already do. Unfortunately, hydropower is pretty harsh on the local environment + cause a bigger danger to the downstream population than a nuclear power plant does.
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@a0flj0 no, you are far too optimistic. Please run the numbers. We could improve things a bit with more/“fatter” HVDC lines (and I cannot fathom why aren’t building them at megascales already), but it still wouldn’t be good enough. Maybe, just maaaybe, sometime in the far future when batteries have become vastly cheaper than they are now AND we have scaled our production capacity for them roughly 100x. Until then, it’s LNG gas (expensive), coal (expensive because the plants are idle most of the time and they are costly to build + the thermal cycling is very rough on them), or pipelined gas (dumb, coz Russia). Or we could just switch to nuclear. It’s cheaper, faster, safer, avoids dependence on Nastystans, and it actually works. Yes, we would need to scale up… but we would also need to do that for “green” energy. We could even keep some wind turbines and solar roofs for sentimentality’s sake…
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Nej, Lars, der er ikke noget der tyder på at Tesla vil lave sine egne fabs... og "ikke noget" er en underdrivelse.
Desuden er der stor forskel på chips. D1 og deres AI chips til bilerne ligger i den høje ende -- de bruger ikke helt de nyeste og dyreste processer, men det er tæt på. Deres MCU kræver også nogle ret ok chips (AMD64-kompatibel CPU chip fra Intel eller AMD + evt en grafikchip + nogle SRAM-chips + nogle flash-chips). De chips bilbranchen står og mangler er i den helt anden ende: det er små microcontrollere, hvor der er (midlertidig) mangel på visse af dem men hvor der findes alternativer der kan bruges i stedet. De kræver IKKE de nyeste og dyreste processer.
Hvis Tesla skulle lave dem allesammen skulle de bygge adskillige fabs (evt under samme tag): superdyre high-end processer til D1, HW3, x86-chips, SRAM-chips, flash-chips ... plus knapt så dyre processer til alle microcontrollerne. Og de ville skulle mestre adskillige high-end processer samtidig: måden man laver SRAM-chips på er dybt anderledes end måden man laver logik på. Måden man laver flash-chips på er igen dybt anderledes.
De dyre processer kræver nogle dybt specialiserede maskiner ("steppers") fra ASML i Holland. Der er lange ventelister på de maskiner og det tager ca et halvt år(!) at kalibrere sådan en maskine efter den er blevet samlet hos kunden.
Det ville være realistik muligt for Tesla at lave en knapt så avanceret fab til microcontrollerne, men hvorfor skulle de, hvis de kan skrive deres driverkode om så den kan køre på andre microcontrollere som er nemmere at skaffe? Og det er rent faktisk hvad de har gjort...
Du kan få en idé om chipproduktion ved at kigge på følgende youtubekanaler: Asianometry, TechTechPotato og ASML's egen kanal.
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Look at a historical gdp/capita graph for Russia. Then do the same for Poland. Also, look at the list of Russian regions ordered by GDP/capita. And take a look at the export tree maps for Poland and Russia. You will see that there has been little growth in Russia, you will see that there is practically no manufacturing or tech in Russia, you will see that it’s exports are dominated by resource extraction (oil, gas, coal, mining, timber, and paper). The resource extraction is dominated by oligarchs. Ordinary people are dirt poor, especially outside of Saint Petersburg and Moscow (the only “tier one” cities). Some still live in komunalkas (shared apartments, each family gets a room, maybe there is only a curtain between the families).
Still think he was a good leader?
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Imagine how much evil the world could have been spared from if those Germans had succeeded. The end of the Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Mao, the Communist China, no Kims, no Korean War, no North Korea, no Vietnam war, no Communist terror groups operating all over Europe, no Greek civil war, no stupid Socialists everywhere in democratic countries pushing for high taxes and big states that made all of us poorer, no anti-nuclear movements (so we would all have had cheap, plentiful, clean energy)…
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@johnmcmillion876 no, he would have gone a bit further. I think the Brits alone could have protected Belgium and the Netherlands and maybe a sliver of Germany. On the other hand, without massive US aid, Stalin wouldn’t have gone as far. In fact, he would probably have lost to Germany and the Soviet regime would have fallen. Germany wouldn’t have been able to hold much territory… and would likely have lost most of it quickly. Result: a weak Germany with no air defenses (= either soon defeated or suing for peace), no Soviet Union, no Mao, no Vietcong, no Kim Il-Sung, no Pol Pot.
That support for the Soviet Union turned out to be very, very expensive.
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