Favorites October 2nd 2021

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I never really got the point of “vertical farming” as an idea but a 95 percent reduction in water usage is a pretty compelling upside. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

It would be cool if this was somehow a way for California to do agriculture, but I'm not sure if lower water use alone will make this useful to us. We'd need a *lot* more solar

Ramez Naam @ramez

What excites me the most about iron flow batteries is just how cheap they can make 12 hour electricity storage. At scale, they should achieve an LCOS (cost of storage) of around 2 cents / kwh. That's staggeringly cheap. 1/n

Ramez Naam @ramez

Softbank Energy to buy a whopping 2GWhs of iron-flow batteries from ESS. That's ~100x the energy storage of Tesla's Hornsdale Power Reserve battery in Australia, once the largest battery on earth. Energy storage is getting real. Non-lithium storage is hitting its tipping point. https://t.co/qqPtuMxTD6

Ramez Naam @ramez

For context, the cost of power from a gas or coal plant (in normal times) is around 5-6 cents / kwh. 2/n

‘in normal times’ because the cost of coal and natural gas have shot up in the last few months.

Ramez Naam @ramez

As I've written extensively, we're in path to eventually have 1 cent solar, and perhaps 2 cent wind, across large swaths of the world. rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/sol… 3/n

rameznaam.comSolar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)This is part 1 of a series where I’ll look at the future costs of clean energy and mobility technologies. This is a refresh of and expansion of my 2015 series on the future of

He suggests that this could put solar/wind + battery at a price lower than the cost of the *fuel* for a coal/natural gas power plant.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

The jobs robots threaten are not the ones you expect: middle managers are actually at risk. High & low skilled employment INCREASES with more general purpose robots, but, as robots don’t need supervision, an entire level of management becomes unnecessary. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

That is *not* what I expected. I hope I count as high skilled...

matthewplan @matthewplan

@cw4emeryville This sealed the deal for me. Cost burdens almost perfectly correlated with the supply of homes per adult

Lower overcrowding predicts lower rates of cost burden from rent. I'm not sure you can get a clearer sign that buliding more homes is the answer.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I’m not a pro-coin dogmatist or anything but if people seriously believe the coin is a bad idea why doesn’t congress amend the statute? The ability to mint unlimited quantities of platinum coins in any denomination is a real provision of a real law.

As noted by many commenters, the trillion dollar coin is no stupider than the Debt ceiling itself.

Merlin Mann @hotdogsladies

2016, Barcelona

I really like this photo, every once in a while I try to remove the reflections. But the more you look, the more you find, until you realize you can even see me taking the photo. In that moment I usually give up on removing the reflections.