Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Real Engineering" channel.

  1. There are plenty of reasons to be against 5G, like I was and still am, but it has nothing to do with health. When 5G came out it was basically a propaganda campaign promissing all sorts of magical leap stuff that simply were not true, with the sole purpose of pushing governments and enterprise to spend a whole ton of money on stuff that ammounts to nothing. I was suspicious from the beginning, with tech press swallowing the lies whole just like they did with Bluetooth 5.0 and other "magical" upgrades. You could only read about advantages, with no drawbacks pointed out. The simpler way to think about 5G is to think about it being closer to Wi-fi rather than celular networks. The tech is different, and there are tons of newer tech involved in 5G, but to put it very simply, it enables faster speeds at the cost of range. You get speeds closer to Wi-fi, but the range is even worse. You know how your smartphone will lose connection to Wi-fi when you are behind a couple of concrete walls? Well, with 5G half a concrete wall will do. Perhaps even a wooden wall, or drywall will make the signal worse than 4G. All the promises of ultra fast Internet connections comes with the caveat that in order for you to get those speeds, you need to sacrifice reach. You gotta be close and in direct sight. So, the millimeter wave speeds of 5G needs almost two orders of magnitude more towers to cover the same area. And it gets worse the more obstacles you have in the way. I dunno the exact numbers, but yep, it is this ridiculous. You need something like hundreds of towers to cover the same area a single 4G tower does inside a city. One for every block or more. Now, if you are old enough you might remember how many years it took for 4G not to be totally spotty throughout your country. 5G towers are smaller, cheaper and easier to install, but still, given how many more are needed, how fast the signal gets weak, and knowing how telecoms operate - unless you live in a major metropolitan area downtown where a 5G tower is likely to be installed close and at view, you are certainly not gonna enjoy any 5G speeds soon. This is a tech for the less than 1%. Likely less than 0.1%. Now, yes, sub-millimiter wave will improve incrementally over LTE, but it certainly isnt the miraculous improvement that was promised, it does not justify how much taxpayer money was already put into this, and it wont solve celular networks worst problems in most countries that have problems with it... because most problems people have with 4G have nothing to do with the tech itself, but all to do with bad practices frrom the networks themselves. This becomes very clear if you ever visit a country with good implementation of 4G LTE... its almost like some alien technology that you never experienced before. Fast, reliable, and enough for most needs. The difference is in how its implemented and managed. Its not about the celular network tech generation, its about old infrastructure, inadequate sizing, not scaling equipment and infrastructure along with the increase of costumers, artificial limitations such as traffic shapping, datacaps and stuff like that. The other thing 5G networks could cause problems with is weather satellite systems, GPS, and a few other stuff like that. Interference is something to worry about... well, it has always been, since radio waves. So there you go. Conspiracy theories regarding 5G are ridiculous, but theres plenty to not like about how 5G implementation and propaganda was done.
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  2. To my understanding, if all you do is raise the shorelines on an island, what you are essencially creating is... a pool. It might stop water from invading from outside, but it also stops water from draining throught the same route, so if flooding comes from some other source, what you end up with is a ton of water that has nowhere to flow. So while I understand that many of those projects are needed, they have to go with something else for long term. Manhattan in particular seems in dire need of some way to drain water, more than ways to stop it from entering, specially if we're talking long term. By 2050 I expect Manhattan to be facing something like a Venice situation... and Venice will either be radically transformed or underwater ruins.
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  3. Thanks for putting out a video on this... I've been trying to explain why this case is so serious and so wrong, but it's hard without quick, concise and clear explanation. The chinese doctor not only used a technique that had no testing and no accessments for problems that could come down the line, he forged documents, lied to parents - making they think there was no other alternative when there was - basically using them as guinea pigs, and knowingly went ahead with a procedure that could kill or have severe side effects down the line for those twins, and their entire family line from then on. Because if something goes wrong with their health later in life, it could become a hereditary genetic disease. He basically played God with human lives. To make things worse, way before this doctor did this, there was already an understanding in the scientific community that CRISPR/CAS-9, while still being a potentially powerful tool in the future, isn't the miraculous thing the initial hype painted it as. The way it works as described by the video doesn't always work when artificially introduced, and it could have severe consequences. People have been testing the method for all sorts of thing (not in humans), and it hasn't been going as well as predicted. Which, you know, only makes what the doctor did worse, and more irresponsible. Part of the entire problem with doing something like this is people thinking it's worth sacrificing lives and fooling people to try new things out. It's not MY kid, so whatever right? You know, like the Nazis did. Experimenting with human lives as if they had no value. Problem is, if we let things go that way, one day it'll be. We cannot let unproven and untested stuff be used in human reproduction willy nilly like that, as it poses an existential threat for the entire species. This is why the scientific community has standards for that sort of thing.
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  4. The answer to every massive geoengineering project is: we don't know enough to risk such an endeavor. We don't have enough data, enough prediction models, technology, enough foresight, enough vision to know what's really going to happen. No matter how much is imagined, thought out, written in thesis and papers, until we have something (like a massive unimaginable AI) that can entirely simulate Earth with all it's components working in a very accurate way as prediction model, geoengineering is gambling with high stakes. We can't even accurately predict the weather just yet, that's how far away we are from something like this. This video in particular went more towards the engineering side of things, of course. But how about completely eliminating entire ecosystems for a whole bunch of species, drastically altering an environment in which tons of species directly and indirectly evolved through millions of years to survive, etc etc. This isn't something to be superficially looked upon. It's just too much of a gamble. A route that should be attempted in a last case scenario, if so. The problem with climate change is just that: a drastic change in environment that our evolution or capability of adapting might not keep pace with. I said this before somewhere else, but in a way, climate change IS geoengineering. It's accelerated change caused by our interference. With a naive outlook, climate change is just geoengineering to make our planet slightly warmer. But it has tons of unpredictable and unforeseen consequences. So fighting against it is pretty much fighting to revert climate to a previous known and stable state that we know we can live in. I'm of the opinion that if we can't even fight climate change back properly, geoengineering is the last thing we should attempt. Because there are huge chances of it going awry, requiring more work to revert than even climate change itself. Put simply, geoengineering carries as much, if not more (since the proposed projects tends to be far more drastic) potential to kill us all as climate change. Remember that, for a while, we thought that industries, oil, coal, and whole ton of pollutants were going to save us all and be part of a fundamental change in human evolution. And for a while, it was. But it has also brought us to this point in time. We thought nuclear fission was going to be the ultimate power source and salvation. We'll solve the nuclear refuse problem someday. We thought lead was a miracle material. Let's use it to line up pipes, surely this won't have consequeces in the future. That putting asbestos everywhere was going to be a great thing. Etc etc. History is marred by things we did which we thought was going to be great, which ended up working against us after a while. Of course, the planet keeps going. The only risk is that we don't. Until we have a failsafe which allows us to revert back safely, which in a way is the fight against climate change, perhaps we shouldn't be thinking much about stuff like geoengineering... just sayin'.
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  5. Semi-related question - if we're talking about large scale energy production, how much sense does it make to instead of thinking about battery solutions like huge lithium based batteries, to use stuff like hydro power pump based storage instead? I know that hydroelectrics also have huge environmental impacts, but comparatively speaking, perhaps it's still better than huge chains of lithium based storage. There will obviously be huge losses in powering pumps to send water to higher elevations and then recovering that power with water turbines, probably way less efficient than batteries, plus you need all that water there... not sure if it's worth consideration. But yeah, very good points. I had some idea around problems of scalability for most renewables, but it's very nice to see it put on paper with an identifiable case like this one. We need to keep looking at all fronts imho. Nuclear power is definitely something that needs to keep getting looked at, as something that can evolve and not something to be constantly looked at with the eyes of something stuck at 70s tech. Other types of battery is something that I think one way or another will be constantly moving forward... because it's not just about renewables or green tech, it's just something we need to evolve one way or another.
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  6. I remember watching one of those tests with an indian or chinese car tha crumpled up to less than half the size because it was made with shit materials... :P
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  7. It seems that for several methods of power generation, the problem we are constantly going against stems from trying to "extract" too much power in extremely focal points which always end up being a problem for the region. In the case of geothermal, it's about drilling and pumping water and other crap underground. Of course that would cause problems. Specially when drilling sites are on top of populated areas. How wouldn't it? All these places that have huge fracking sites will go down the same way sooner or later... it's just logical. We're structurally weakening the foundations of all these places. And the damages that are being caused are non-repairable - they were built by millions of years of natural processes. I think that at some point we'll have to accept that harvesting power is an expensive thing, and that we'll have to make it much smaller and spread out to reduce pinpoint stresses and overexploitation of specific areas. In that sense, wind and solar are going to a better direction. They are the least "invasive" methods of power extraction. Geothermal might be an efficient, local solution for places where the thermal energy is already flowing to the surface, but only in those places where the power can be extracted without forcing the system too much. If it gets to the point we have to drill deep holes and inject crap there, just stop and find something else. Or deal with the consequences of trying to play God.
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  8. Discarding redundant technologies for something that will have human lives at stake when it's in use is a fool's errand... something that anyone would expect from Musk I guess. The guy has an extremely bad habit of talking crap that makes he seem like a prepotent idiot. Just so people know, Lidar is still evolving and in development, the latest units in development are preditect to go down the single digit thousand dollars per unit, and they are also small. The prediction is that two or four of them could be stuck close to blinkers. Which is a very reasonable price for something that can improve visibility in all sorts of scenarios. Of course, neural networks with regular cameras, radars and whatnot are all good. No one questions that, including Uber and Waymo. Arguably, Waymo and Google have been working on that sort of tech far longer than Tesla is.... a whole ton of papers related to image recognition, AI and neural networks have been produced and released by Google a long time before Tesla even existed. I've recently seen a whole bunch of tech videos and tech publications saying how Tesla came up with all these crazy image recognition tech which was presented on Autonomy Day... bullshit. Most of it was presented on a TED talk 4 years ago by a Google engineer. Weird how people just forgot about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg I've said once and I'll say it again. I really don't like all the bravado and strong man talk that Musk sometimes come out with. I respect his accomplishments, yes, specially on the SpaceX side. But sometimes the guy can be a dick. Which I think is just sad. It's not the sort of attitude I wanna see for the development of vehicles that will be driving around in the hundreds or thousands everywhere I go. Uber is even worse, just to be clear, but if I had to pick a company that I feel is doing right, at the proper pace, and proper care... it's Waymo, even though I very much don't like Google or Alphabet a whole lot too. At the very least, it's the only company so far without a fatality. Uber had that very tragic one, but Tesla had 3 already... only counting the ones where autopilot was confirmed to be on.
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  9. Apple alone has never been responsible for most of the hardware advances in their products, be it panels, touchscreen, SoCs, and whatnot. They do the design and software. iPhone X is far from being the first time Samsung is listed ammong parts supplier. For the most part, Apple design their stuff, tells manufacturers their requirements, and manufacturers try to meet demand. Samsung already did in the past their SoCs, LG and Japan Display was once responsible for the LCD panels (thus investment), Sony is still majorly responsible for camera modules of several brands, Toshiba for storage, etc etc. This is of course not unique to Apple... smartphones in general are a mishmash of components made by several different brands. This is also part of the reason why it's so hard for smartphone manufacturers to get out of places like Shenzhen. If your company moves away from there, you are at a major disadvantage in comparison to other brands designing products close together with all major component manufacturers. This is also valid for several categories of products including laptops, desktops, all in ones, set tops, smart watches and whatnot. Lots of people gets this wrong, but then again electronics brands are very opaque about it.
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  10. Less than a minute in: imperial unit defenders will have a pissy fit. xD
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  11. Incredibly optimistic and idealistic, but sure.
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  12. All that people need to know about geoengineering and the multiple proposals that came up is that ultimately, Climate Change IS geoengineering itself. It's human made injection of artificially produced substances in an understudied and uncontrolled manner that put us in the situation in the first place. Someone with a PHD, or even multiple scientists is still far from enough to implement something like that because the potential for multiple negative chain reactions far surpasses any chances of it actually working to reverse the problem, to the point I'd call going forward with something like this complete blind optimism, almost to cult like levels. And a very big component as to why it's a problem for us and other lifeforms is the change part. Because we and other organisms currently inhabiting the planet are sensitive to stuff like temperature extremes, general instability, fast changes. You see, I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything, but people really should consider the alternative. I think we should just continue slowly working to reverse trends. Humans and societies in general are slow to change, but it is what ultimately is needed. And yes, this is even considering the horrible costs we will have to deal with. It is likely that objectives won't be met, and even with the most optimistic scenario millions of people, animal and plant species and entire countries will die off in the process. We will have wars over this. The potential for extinction isn't nil. It's a bleak scenario that has already started. But there is nothing that can't get worse, and my personal perception tells me that there are far more chances of things getting even worse with geoengineering than getting better. It's only a personal opinion though. And you can be sure that as the situation aggravates, there will be more and more people in favor of shortcuts like geoengineering. It is bad enough that people are considering the option at this point.
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