As a minimum, a local emergency deparment should have an automatic interface to the nearest weather radar. If a radar scan suggests “ocean falling down”, people should be alerted with text messages in the same way they’d be alerted of a wildfire, chemical leak or incoming missile strike.
What I notice in the comments of the county officials: some of them claimed “it could not have been prevented, even with radar”.
Here in Eastern Europe, a weather radar makes a full turn in 5 minutes and I think that faster ones exist in fancier places. An SMS takes at most 15 minutes to deliver, with some arriving in seconds and some trailing behind if the network is under load.
Also, I’m sure some US states get even tornados, and are damn quick at sending out alerts about those things… so the diagnosis is “as usual, people ignored a considerable risk”. They had not set up automation. People could have been alerted, tech for that exists already for a decade or more.
The image caption does say “could double”, but the PNAS article doesn’t mention that. As far as I understand, the role of the Southern Ocean as a whole as a carbon sink is big (two-digit percentage of human-caused emissions). But the effect subdivides into biological (phytoplankton) and physical (currents downwelling CO2-rich water and upwelling CO2-poor water). And I’m not aware or capable of pointing out a balance sheet of how much each component does.
Yes. It seems to have turned a part of the ocean which acted as a carbon sink into a carbon source. They don’t mention gigatonnes, but I would guess: a few (that’s a lot).
It’s like with earthquakes. At first, when nobody knows jack s**t, they tell you 10 people died.
When the statistics come home, often enough, an initial 10 turns into 10 000.
With a heat wave spanning half a continent and breaking records, the typical mortality to expect (basing on experience) is at least 1000 people (some of them old and about to go anyway, but pushed over the edge by heat).
I think the 38% number is definitely wrong, maybe even wrong by one order of magnitude.
I tried fact-checking and came up with this:
https://providencemag.com/2018/04/what-a-country-immigrants-serve-us-military-well
Few Americans realize that 65,000 immigrants serve in the US military today. That number includes some 18,700 troops who hold green cards (in other words, legal permanent residents who are not yet naturalized citizens). According to the Pentagon, about 5,000 such residents enlist each year.
Since the total number of the US armed forces is around 1.3 million, it follows that 38% is definitely wrong and the correct number of immigrants is likely around 5%.
I think the 38% number originates from service member naturalization stats or service member family stats and has been mis-interpreted. Can’t tell for sure, didn’t hire a spy to find out. :)
P.S. Edit: found a secondary source with similar data:
https://www.usafis.org/can-i-join-the-us-military-as-a-green-card-holder/
Approximately 8,000 Green Card holders join the US military each year and around 35,000 are currently serving on active duty.
Since green card holders aren’t the only variety of immigrant, the number 65 000 seems plausible.
My estimate is that this will result on 410 lawsuits filed per day. :o
I think it’s not a smart move to have 150 000 lawsuits per year over the same question - it’s much preferable to have 1 lawsuit for a whole class of people - defending the rights of everyone in the same situation - and some extra lawsuits for those who want to present a unique take on the matter.
They use resistive heating, so they can only charge it dirt cheap when there is surplus solar or wind.
It’s a pretty neat system:
However, heat stores are subject to scaling laws which don’t favour sand on the large scale, at least unless it’s underground (and then you have to keep groundwater out to avoid vaporizing it). Large thermal stores benefit from storing heat in water, and placing the water deep underground, so the boiling point rises. If local rock has low thermal conductivity, even better.
For comparison Helsinki (.fi) has a 10 GWh underground thermal store. Where I live, Tallinn (.ee) will soon get a 1 GWh surface thermal store. And Vantaa (.fi) will soon complete a whopping 90 GWh thermal store that’s located 100 m underground, so their water will boil at 140 C instead of the usual 100 C. Boiling points up to 300 C are attainable in practise, then the curve starts leveling out.
It was meant to be humorous framing, given the impossibility of making humans from magma or the iron core. :)
Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce?
I honestly believe that “we” aren’t going to do jack s**t. It’s a process which is nearly unsteerable. People are going to live longer and longer, and use resources that would otherwise be used by children they might have had. Society is going to be burdened by caring for the old, and this is going to reduce chances of caring for the young.
In nearly every developed country, population growth is slowing or population has already started decreasing. Only in the least developed regions (some areas of Africa) does the opposite still apply, but UN predictions (made by competent people) suggest the process just reaches there later.
So, every ethnicity’s population is going to be reduced. Every ethnicity can also consider if their numbers are adequate, too high or too low. If a nation feels threatened by disappearing from the maps, they can try to reorganize their society. Random ideas: a few laws that give parents various health and social security guarantees regardless of their employment status, especially in case they’re single parents, then maybe create a few dating sites that actually try to help their users find people they like, etc…
There is plenty of resources to support humanity.
I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.
I think we shouldn’t use up every atom on Earth to churn out more humans. Our species has experienced a massive population explosion and is at peak numbers.
Usually this kind of events are followed by a hurtful population crash. It seems considerably better if growth ends due to a (subconscious?) decision to stop expanding, rather than a war for remaining resources.
The founder of the Antinatalism International, Anugraha Kumar Sharma, argues that “there is absolutely no hope whatsoever in this world.”
Well, that’s hard to argue against. I might disagree, but I cannot artificially give him any hope, even if he wants some.
For some, the progressive embrace of antinatalism might just be a reaction to the pronatalism espoused by the Right. Because Vice President J. D. Vance wants you to have more children, the only natural reply is that we ought to have none.
Not for me. They can want all they want, but to consider children, I imagine I would need to find a society relatively free of strife, a society with lower risk. I would need to feel somewhat secure in my own future, because you have to raise children for a hefty amount of time. Most importanly, I’d have to find someone who’d like to do this together.
Some creatures respond to environmental stress by breeding earlier and faster, and trying to do that more desperately. I cannot find such a response in my own “code”. I respond to environmental stress by saving resources to overcome hardship, and focusing effort to defeat the source of hardship. If that means a decline in population by 1.7 people, so be it.
I think that in the modern times, more people have started thinking this way. Having children is expensive and can effectively put you below the poverty line, and stop you from pursuing goals, whatever they are.
I’m not even anti-natalist. I’m just not interested in reproduction - precisely because I still have a future that I might influence for the better - but not if I waste my resources on reproduction.
Also, I think a scarcity of humans might actually cause society to value humans more. In the Middle Ages, when the plague reduced populations, serfs were able to obtain better conditions and break the pattern of slavery in many lands. Feudal lords struggled because their vast empty lands could not be managed by their dwindling crew - someone could till a field or hunt game without paying taxes or asking for permission out there. Of course, this pattern might not apply in modern times, however.
the global democratic left has been incapable of developing an economic agenda that looks beyond the next election cycle.
Not sure if I can agree. Over here, the agenda looks pretty clear. Achieve progressive taxation. Achieve higher taxation of capital than labour. Achieve lower taxation of worker-owned companies. Achieve universal health insurance. Beyond the economic, achieve a governing system not disproportionately influenced by the wealthy. Preferably, achieve all this without violence.
(and reaching those goals is prevented by the disproportionate propaganda capability of the economic right, mostly financed by the wealthy)
It’s not the range. With this technology, it’s just the combination of fuel and exhaust that makes it unlikely to reach peaceful applications sooner.
A user of this technology must be willing to tolerate (and cause) considerable inconvenience just to increase the range of their electric aircraft.
Fuel distribution would be an annoying but surmountable problem. Not the easiest, but doable. Sodium needs to be stored either in mineral oil or inert gas. Otherwise it will spontaneously oxidize quite fast. Airports would need sodium warehouses with specialized equipment (either oil baths to submerge it or some kind of lockers with an unbreathable atmosphere). Trucks with the same kind of equipment would be needed to deliver the stuff. Maybe a bottle system could be devised, whereupon sodium is solid in a bottle and the bottle is heated above 100 C to pour it out.
Fuel production efficiency would be a problem. I don’t know the efficiency of sodium production, but intuitively this is likely to be around 80% (plus road transport). Charging a battery from the grid is more efficient, so the user of this technology must either have cheap electrical energy (this might be true in future with lots of renewables) or be willing to ignore the cost of energy (military users will do that already now, just promise them a bit more flight range).
Finally, public debate about a caustic exhaust stream is likely to be non-trivial. I predict that people will be quite worried about the direct effects of NaO and NaOH air pollution - it’s one of those things which is clearly health negative, even if climate positive. Convincing people that it’s safe will require studies about how quickly NaO turns into NaOH, and how quickly the exhaust stream neutralizes and becomes safe. Unsurprisingly, military users are pretty unconcerned about being health negative - most of their tools are like that.
Thanks for the tip, both the popular and scientific article are interesting.
Short summary of the pros and cons:
energy density: 3 x better than lithium ion
power density: really poor (if they raise their power density by 10 times, it will suffice for cruising, takeoff will require supplementary high-current batteries)
exhaust: sodium oxide (caustic), converted by moisture in air to sodium hydroxide (caustic), converted by CO2 into sodium bicarbonate (harmless) --> this is a tech for cruising up high, not for takeoff or flight above settlements (“don’t stick unprotected head into exhaust stream, risk of losing eyes”)
climate impact: positive, removes CO2 from air
operating temperature: reasonable (about 100 C)
mass production of sodium: doable, but somewhat messy
fire safety: sodium burns just as bright as lithium, nothing cheerful here
My personal conclusion: currently, this is a potential military technology (“electric cruise missiles / strike drones with 500 km range”), likely won’t reach passenger or cargo aviation soon due to lack of sodium handling infrastructure.
I hope they get mild sentences because they didn’t even manage to enter.
The law is extremely dumb, as it sends the message “accomplish maximum obstruction, as you will get massive sentences, don’t talk with anyone, don’t even consider getting caught”.
Maybe next time, someone does like some alleged (claim unverified) anarchists in France. They burned a substation and cut down a high voltage pylon. Most likely a bit foolish because they didn’t stop the Cannes film festival from completing (it had backup power), but the point remains: they caused a massive pain in the ass for hundreds of thousands of people. If they get caught and get 10 years, they can say it was worth it.
Dishing out 10 year sentences for attempting to stop a plane from using a taxiway by standing in front of it… is not very smart from a judicial viewpoint. People might do the math and find they’d get smaller sentences for considerably bigger deeds.
Некоторые мысли:
скорее всего, по-русски здесь говорят немногие (но, конечно, есть автоматический перевод). Я говорю, но это не мой родной язык. Чтобы побудить людей к дискуссии, я бы порекомендовал английский.
создание бренда, который передает какую-то информацию о продуктах (напр. “произведенный компанией, которая следует этическим и экологическим нормам”), на мой взгляд, решение проблемы не с того конца - бренды так не появляются
типичный бренд (например, Raspberry Pi) начинается с одного продукта (часто экспериментального) и расширяется. Добавляют новые продукты. Если они лучше, бренд получает репутацию.
в ходе жизни типичной компании в какой-то момент возникает соблазн обменять репутацию (форму социального капитала) на деньги, сделав что-то дешево и не выполнив обещаний
однако, иногда существующие компании создают регуляторные альянсы, чтобы донести до потребителей мысль: “мы не те ребята, мы сохранили некоторые этические принципы”
Но, повторюсь, мне это кажется очень абстрактным и “высоко в облаках”.
— translation —
Some thoughts:
most likely, few people can speak Russian here (but of course, automatic translation exists). I can, but it’s not my native language. To get people to discuss, I would recommend English.
creating a brand that conveys useful information about products (e.g. “made by a company that follows ethical and ecological guidelines”) is, in my opinion, solving the problem from the wrong end… brands don’t appear like this
a typical brand (e.g. “Raspberry Pi”) starts from a single product (often experimental) and expands. New products are added. If they are better, the brand gets a reputation
a classic problem awaits then: in the course of a typical company’s life, at some point, there comes a temptation to exchange a good reputation (a form of social capital) into money, by doing something cheaply and not fulfilling promises
sometimes, however, existing companies do establish regulatory alliances to communicate to consumers “we are not those guys, we have retained some ethics”
But I repeat, this seems very abstract and “high in the clouds” to me.
"My immediate reaction was to say, ‘I don’t talk with the FBI,’” Neill said. The man said, “OK,” and Neill shut the door. Two other activists described similar visits in interviews with WBUR.
This guy is my hero. :)
Sounds like a nice material. :)
100% prevention is probably unattainable, but in case of the childrens’ camp an early word of competent instruction “get away from rivers and find shelter on high ground” would have probably helped a lot. Even if it would have woken up only 10% of the people, they could have woken up the rest.