Favorites October 2nd 2024
This is a cool way to do CO2 capture with water, I've spoken previously about similar ideas (olivine weathering) that can be done in the ocean instead of a river, but the upside of using a river is that you can easily measure the results instead of depending on simply trusting the chemistry to work out. Downside is that it's smaller scale. Here's a separate whole thread (cached) explaining the advantages of this limestone/river approach.
This brings the 12 month moving average to about 6% of US electricity.
Really really good stuff. Here's the exact quote from the Harris campaign. The Geothermal one faced basically no opposition. The forest fires one actually had some democratic opposition (cached), which seems dumb of them.
Keeping shipping stuck in the past would be very bad. As Noah Smith said in his article on this topic, this union is under the impression that new technologies will replace workers, even though past improvements all resulted in more workers. But in our current world of very high employment rates, this is just foolish. Be like West coast longshoremen, who allowed automation but ensured that workers shared in the profits.
Longer Reads
• A thread explaining how Republican lawyers think they can ban abortion nationwide without any new legislation, using the Comstock Act (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Twitter gave in to a Brazilian court order (src)(cached)
– Biden administration's new policies (cached) against chinese software in connected cars seems like a less protectionist way to handle real threats. (src)(cached)
– Once again, a good way to get word emissions from Steel manufacturing down is to use a tarrif on other countries steel based on their production process emissions. (src)(cached)
– Did you know that the Three Mile Island "worst disaster in US history" was studied extensively to find out the total impact on mortality from radioactive emissions, the answer was that it killed zero people, no impact on mortality. (src)(cached)
– The main argument Tesla people make for why they'll win would be considered crazy in other industries. "Sure it doesn't work, but at least it's cheaper". (src)(cached)
– Before Newsom announced his decision to Veto AB 1047, one commentator was at least happy with the process, going on a long thread about how CA lawmakers actually care about this subject and are trying to make the right decision. (src)(cached)
– New EV batteries are up to 10 year / 600k mile warranties, they outlast the car! This makes vehicle based backup for houses possible. (src)(cached)
– Remember that modern US regulatory ideas apply mostly to the government itself, making it harder for the State to do anything. (src)(cached)
– US companies accidentally hired North Korean spies who simply refused zoom meetings. (src)(cached)
– A study of specifically whether Ozempic reduces addiction, and, yep, it does. Here's another on alcohol specifically. Here's more (cached). In other news, US obesety fell from 42% to 40% in the last year (cached) (src)(cached)
– The Hewlett foundation is paying The Atlantic to run explicitly pro-Trump policy stories. (src)(cached)
– The 'technical recession' from early 2022 appears to have essentially been statistical noise, revised data shows we only had one quarter of gdp decline. (src)(cached)
– Switching to green energy via subsidies instead of taxes has worked really really well. (src)(cached)
– Type 1 diabetes reversed using reprogrammed stem cells. (src)(cached)
– Apparently OpenAI's recent GPT-4o actually failed it's safety checks, but they had already released it. (src)(cached)
– It's wild that you can read along as the Supreme leader of Iran tweets through the destruction of the command staff of one of their regional proxy organizations. (src)(cached)
– Study in mice of a nasal spray that creates a physical mucus barrier that massively reduces the rates of viral and bacterial infection from common pathogens. (src)