jartelt

Ok - carbon dioxide removal is going to be needed to meet to the 2 degree C target too.

Sure, you can reforest or afforest with whatever trees you want. It certainly will help but won't solve the issue alone.

According to the IPCC, to meet the 1.5 degree C target we need to be doing 6 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide removal per year by 2050.

It would be very difficult to reach that scale with reforestation and afforestation along in the next 27 years.

Plus, if you simply bury wood it will be broken down over time and release methane. No one has yet developed a scalable way to bury large quantities of wood and keep them from decomposing (startups/researchers are starting to work in this area).

One reason cooling is used is to protect the Li-ion or lead acid batteries in the uninterruptible power supplies that provide backup power to the servers. Both Li-ion and lead acid lose calendar life and reliability when operated at 40 C. So, you have extra battery replacement costs and reliability concerns at higher temperature.

I also would imagine that you need some type of cooling system even to keep the ambient temperature at 40C. Otherwise the servers are just continuously pumping out heat and the temperature may get high enough to the point where you have equipment issues. It could be the case that the equipment needed to cool to 25C is not that different or more expensive that the equipment needed to maintain a temperature of 40C.

A portion of parents are very worried about Covid in their children. These parents have sway with school administrators and local governments. All I am saying is that I doubt we get total easing of Covid restrictions until these kids have had ample chance to be vaccinated. I'm not making any arguments or claims about what you are taking about.

Yes - which why I doubt we will see full "reopening" everywhere until they open up boosters to everyone and provide time for people who want them to get them.

I could see things starting to really ease up once all children have had a chance to be vaccinated and everyone else has had a chance to get their 6 month booster shot.

1) A large increase in evictions will mostly affect the rental market. There would be some single family home rentals affected, but mostly it would affect apartments.

A lot of homeowners who needed help during the start of the pandemic were able to get a forbearance on their mortgage. Thus, there was not a huge increase in foreclosures and instead people just had extra payments tacked onto the end of their mortgage.

3) If anything, wealthy homeowners are getting a tax break. Congress is considering a repeal of the SALT deduction limit, which helps homeowners.

5) The number of people who were fired or quit due to mandates has been very small.

One group of people playing soccer, football, or baseball can take up almost the entire turf space in a small popular park. Think of Dolores Park is SF. On weekends it's packed with people picnicking. If instead 20 people were playing baseball, it would not be safe for anyone to picnic nearby because of the risk for errant baseballs.

On the other extreme end of things, one person hitting golf balls in a park can make the park unsafe for everyone else. At some point, the government institutes regulations to keep the park fun/safe/useful for the largest number of people.

Many of the rapidly growing Phoenix suburbs are projected to find themselves in trouble with regards to water resources in the future. These suburbs have met their 100+ years of water requirement using the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGRD), an entity created in the 1990s tasked with replacing pumped groundwater by finding renewable water supplies and injecting that water back into the aquifer.

However, the current drought and temperature projections going forward show that it will be increasingly difficult for CAGRD to find water to inject back into the aquifer to meet its obligations. In the end these suburbs will either need to pay super high rates for water to inject into aquifers or will need to slow growth.

https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.6/south-water-rapid-growth-in-...

It's similar in California. In the years leading up to the big Santa Cruz mountain fire in 2020, the scientists and forest rangers were aware of the increasing amount of fuel building up in the forest there. They simply weren't able to do the controlled burns they wanted because of a lack of weather windows for controlled burns. That area is also close to silicon valley so there are extra air quality requirements for the burns.

Much of the forest in CA is managed by the US Forest Service, so you can't blame CA officials for everything. Plus, you can only safely do controlled burns in certain weather windows (not super hot, rain likely coming, etc.). Given we are in the middle of a historic drought, the dry fuel levels are likely much too high to safely start controlled burns.

Yea, you are right about the 2% interest rates changing the breakdown. I was referencing numbers I ran back when rates were 3-4%. That said, most folks still rely on 30 years mortgages!

The first several years of the mortgage you are paying mostly interest and not as much towards equity. Plus, you have paid closing costs when you bought, will pay 6% to a realtor when you sell, and have paid property tax and homeowners insurance.

If you sell after 5 years, you are only making money if your home value happened to have gone up. This is by no means a guarantee on a short time frame.

Yep, that starter pack looks good. Love that they include a 6 speed driver instead of a 9 speed!

People who throw really hard probably benefit from the higher speed discs, but there are also very good players that drive 9 speeds. Advanced players will carry a variety of drivers with differing speeds because they will want different flight paths depending on the given hole layout. Also, whether you are throw into a headwind or with a tailwind changes how fast the disc is flying (relative to the air).

In general, most drivers are designed to fly in a "S" shaped flight path. When you get this full flight path, you get the most distance. For a right hand player throwing backhand that means your throw should draw slightly to the right at first, straighten out, and then finish with a fade to the left.

If you throw a disc that is rated at too high a speed for you, it will just quickly fade to the left and go into the ground. You often see beginners chucking their drivers way out to the right in order to compensate for this quick turn to the left. It's just really hard to get distance when you do this because the high speed disc really wants to turn left and dive into the ground.

If you throw a disc that is rated too low a speed for you, it will draw too far to the right and will not straighten out and come back left. In this case, you should either throw a bit less hard or move up to a higher speed disc. For beginners it is better to start here because you can actually get a feel for how throwing speed changes the disc flight path.

Just in case anyone reads the article or comments here and decides they want to try out disc golf, here's a tip... DO NOT go out and buy a high speed driver disc (speed >9) to use as a beginner or intermediate. You almost certainly will not be able to throw it hard enough to fly properly and it will lead to frustration, poor form, and inconsistent results. Stick with a putter, a mid-range, and maybe a fairway driver (speed 6 or 7).

The speed rating on discs can be tricky for beginners. It's intuitive to think that a high speed rating on a disc means it will fly faster and further. However, a high speed rating actually means you need to throw that disc faster in order for it to fly it's proper flight path. If you do not throw a high speed driver hard enough, it will just go 100 feet and curve into the ground. Beginners and intermediates typically will throw lower speed discs farther than they would throw the high speed driver.

There are regulations governing the size and shape of the discs, so that type of modification would likely be illegal. But also, it would probably destroy the aerodynamics

The distinction is important when you think about how and whether or not to combat the issue. If general prices are rising due to runaway inflation and rising wages (like in the US in the 70s), then the central bank knows it can raise interest rates to help slow things down. If prices of a few assets like used cars, cargo, or hand sanitizer are rising because of temporary shortages, raising interest rates is not going to do much.

None of this vision would work for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that insurance companies are not going to agree to pay for medications that are not proven effective.

Your personal freedom to try whichever medications you want would be limited unless you are willing to pay out of pocket for everything.

They will face two big challenges trying to make these for stationary storage:

1) Lifetime - Historically aluminum ion batteries struggle with cycle life. The aluminum ions are bigger than lithium ions so the batteries endure more strain during charge/discharge cycles. For grid-scale storage, you need to be able to last >10,000 cycles so they need to address this.

2) Scaling up the size of the batteries. Eventually they will need to move on from coin cells and start making larger battery cells. Many technologies struggle to keep their fast charge/discharge characteristics when they scale up in size. We'll see how they do with this.

Also, this statement is very strange:

Testing by peer-reviewed specialist publication Advanced Functional Materials publication concluded the cells had “outstanding high-rate performance (149 mAh g−1 at 5 A g−1), surpassing all previously reported AIB cathode materials”.

Advanced Functional Materials is just a journal. They do not do third-party testing (unless something really has changed in scientific publishing in that last few years). Just because your paper was accepted for publication doesn't mean you can go around claiming your device performance has been validated by outside investigators. The peer-reviewers for journals just look at the data/figures submitted and make a judgement call on if it looks legit/plausible or if it looks fake/wrong. They don't actually get devices from the authors and test them out in their own labs to verify things...

For third party verification you need to pay outside consultants (e.g. Exponent) to test your devices or need to get a national lab like NREL to test things.

I'll be convinced there is a serious inflation problem if broad-based measures show inflation >3% in 12 months time. In the meantime, a lot of the price increases cited by individuals seem to be related to pandemic-caused supply chain issues, which will hopefully be worked out within the next 12 months.

Much of the available data is only pointing to inflation being on the order of 2.5% in the coming years. This is hardly the runaway inflation scenario many are predicting and is close to the target inflation rate of 2%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIFR

https://www.clevelandfed.org/our-research/indicators-and-dat...

Yes, some things (housing, lumber, used cars, etc.) are experiencing quick increases in price. Some are saying this is a sign of runaway inflation. Many others are saying these price increases are a result of pandemic related supply/demand issues and temporary shocks to supply chains.

Another issue is rail capacity for transporting lumber from sawmills. Even if the sawmills were able to ramp up and massively increase their supply, we could run into a bottleneck with transport. The mills typically sign contracts with rail companies ahead of time (based on projected demand) and it's not likely they could all of the sudden get double the number of trains if supply went up.

In that case, then your manager could not support you going remote and require you to come back. If that were the case, I would understand (though it would be a bummer for you).

I am saying there are employees at google who a performing well remotely now, their manager/VP support them staying remote, but Google HR is saying they must return to the office anyways. Google should just allows managers/VPs to let employees stay remote if they are good employees and are performing well. Instead they are pushing a one size fits all policy and haven't said anything about possible manager/VP exceptions.

The large tech companies routinely say that hiring qualified engineers is their biggest challenge.

And that is totally fine. You and anyone who wants to go back to the office should be absolutely allowed to do so! The issue is more with the modest number of folks who prefer to work remotely and prefer not live near a Google campus.

If you are a high performer who has manager/VP level approval to stay remote, why would Google HR force you to move back to a Google office? They should just allow some folks to work full remote if they have support and approval from their managers, but instead Google corporate is saying everyone needs to be close to their office on Sept 1.

Also, if you are google employee who already moved away from the bay area, it may actually be easier to switch jobs (to a full remote option) than it is to move back to the bay area on September 1.

Many of the employees that are angry have already left, and have been working remote for 6+ months. The hard part of moving is already done. If anything, staying with google would be the more difficult choice since they need to move back!

Most doctors I have heard from note that side effects for vaccines (if they occur) almost always pop up shortly after the vaccine is administered. There are rarely, if ever, side effects that have occurred years after vaccine administration. Thus, we have no reason to believe these vaccines will have any significant long term side effects.

I hate the voice search on AppleTV for this very reason. I so wish that voice would just search within the app I am using instead of sending me to the itunes store or somewhere else. Why make me click and swipe extra times to get to the specific app search box...? If I want to search globally, I could just hit the home button and then search!