You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
It's not like before Thalidomide companies were just cool with putting baby-mutating pills on the market. There were existing regulations, and concerned voices, but those were ignored or silenced. Even after concrete proof of harm was obtained, the medication was continued to be sold in some places.
Diesel is another one of these stories - with dieselgate being Act 2 of the whole diesel scam - diesel was pushed as clean because it performed better on traditional tests of environmental impact gasoline was subjected to.
Any chemist with half a brain would've told you that's because it produces different combustion products, which are in turn, not measured.
Dieselgate was merely an attempt to continue the scam which shouldn't have been started in the first place.
And strict regulation more often than not, favors the established players who don't have to comply with it - example is housing, where construction of new housing is subject to rules old houses are not needed to comply with - artificially limiting the ability to solve the housing crisis while pushing up prices.
Various emissions and safety regulations in the auto industry were also basically straight up scams - they drove buyers towards more complex and less reliable, but more expensive to repair cars, and unfairly favored large vehicles which had an easier time complying with them.
The various driver assist safety systems were also found to not lower accident rates to justify their existence - and are universally hated by drivers everywhere.
Many people nowadays express the sentiment that they'd rather keep their old car around and drive it into the ground before purchasing a new one for these reasons.
And now that we have these strict safety regulations after the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever due to the extreme cost of going through the approval process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course, that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates were addictive. What are we paying for again?
> Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so.
What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20% chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?
Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it become then?
Carbon capture is a waste of time. You essentially have to suck the entire atmosphere through capture facilities.
It's completely infeasible in practice, the largest plant we have right now is called mammoth and in order to offset our current emissions we would need a million mammoths. A million of these large, expensive facilities that take years to build.
The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good form of carbon capture, anyhow).
To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it. The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to capture k*X amount of CO2.
Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?" There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by government is essential. They get too much slack from being slow, from regulators to court.
> what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.
Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global warming, no?
Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought through. Do you really believe that EV business owners are the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
But if we own real estate, we see the limitation and destruction of housing stock as value creation benefiting own personal assets. From that perspective, reducing this sort of low cost housing makes perfect sense.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.
HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
We should have federal legislation requiring tugboat assist adequate to recover from complete loss of power and steering, through shipping channels that go under bridges supported by mid span support columns. The mechanism should be that if the Coast Guard catches you without a tug, the ship is permanently banned from the port under threat of seizure and repossession by the US federal government, or your vessel just gets immediately seized and held in port under bond.
Insurance providers insuring ships in US waters should also be required to permanently deny insurance coverage to vessels found to be out of compliance, though I doubt the insurance companies would want to play ball.
Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!
I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s
It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
This is a mechanism by which some oil deposits are thought to have formed, and by which a large quantity of biospheric carbon was sequestered during earlier warm spells, refered to as the Eocene Azolla Event.
Essentially: arctic seas formed fresh-water "lenses" through meltwater, which promoted plant growth (in particular azolla, though likely also algae and plankton). This growth then sank to the sea-floor, depositing as oils (and much ultimately undergoing keroginisation to form petroleum).
Similar mechanisms have been proposed for addressing carbon sequestration goals in the present, e.g., "CO2 sequestration by propagation of the fast-growing Azolla spp. " <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8520330/>.
It could also be the opposite of a carbon capture mechanism is the detritus if those algal blooms are broken down by archaea and turned into methane, which could then return to the atmosphere. Methane is about 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.
The cartwheel fails are pretty brutal, it never learned how to catch itself and break its own fall. Cartwheel is a remarkable demo, I initially thought it was a joke and fake until I saw the blooper reel. Now I half believe it.
Those bots never learn by themselves. It's same as how animations on beautiful LPs don't write themselves. They're all "fake" in that sense, but also "real" in the sense that they would not be just gifs or mp4s but callbacks would be firing and running on customer browsers.
Figuring out the meaning of the acronym "LP"s will be for the archeologists to decipher, I suppose.
EDIT: Future archeologist here (3 minutes after posting). It stands for "Live Performance", which is an unnecessarily obscure way of saying something that isn't obvious from the context alone.
It's on the same level as people using incandescent light bulbs. Well we clear 160k Euros after taxes and have public medical care, and electricity is 10c/kWh here, so why does it matter what bulbs we use?
We live in an area surrounded by grass fed cows, so what does it matter if we throw away 3/4 of our steak?
Without regard to how plentiful resources are in our particular area, being needlessly wasteful is in bad taste more than anything. It's a lack of appreciation of the value of what we have.
For water specifically - it is generally speaking the most valuable resource available, we just don't appreciate it because we happen to have a lot of it.
While I'm not saying waste when things are plentiful in general is okay, I think water is a unique case that can be treated differently.
Comparing to energy costs isn't the same because using the energy for the incandescent bulb consumes that energy permanently. The gas/coal/fuel can't be un-burned. Although solar changes this as the marginal cost of that energy is free.
Comparing to food is similar. Once the food is wasted it is gone.
Water is typically not destroyed, it's just moved around in the water cycle. Water consumption in a region is dictated by the throughput the water cycle replenishes the reservoirs you're pulling from. "Waste" with water is highly geographic, and it's pretty reasonable to take exception to California projecting their problems to geographic regions that they aren't important.
Sun is continuously running a very nice distillation cycle the size of the world that makes fairly clean water just fall out of the sky. It's only a question of where does it fall, and how much. If you want it even cleaner, wait a couple centuries for it to filter down underground, and get it from there - besides maybe a bit high mineral contents, that can easily be removed, it's essentially free, clean water. The only question is how much it's replenished in the area you're taking it from.
There's plenty of areas where there's more rainfall, than there is outflow/evaporation, with water continuously replenishing deep groundwater. "Saving water" in such areas is of little concern besides the basic, economic one of well maintenance - each one can only pull so much, and more usage means more wells, and more upkeep.
> For water specifically - it is generally speaking the most valuable resource available, we just don't appreciate it because we happen to have a lot of it.
And for water specifically, the second order effects from "water saving" programs can be actually negative. Not enough water means that sewers don't work properly any more, leading from events of stink to helping fatbergs grow [1].
To make it worse, the "obvious" idea of scaling down sewer mains doesn't work either because the sewers are (at least in Europe) also used as storm drains, so if you'd scale down the sewers you'd get streets flooded.
It's nothing like either of those things because both of those things have harms to other people and those harms scale linearly with the amount of consumption. Wasting steak isn't problematic because you run out of cows it's problematic because of the climate impact of raising them.
Saying that saving water is "about respect" or something is idiotic. Saving water is about ensuring there's enough water to go around. This is something you need to do in places where water is scarce and not where it isn't. And if you waste time and energy on saving water you are ultimately making the world poorer.
Obviously I'm simplifying things by talking in absolutes here, but what I said above about "the margin at which it makes sense" gets at the truth of the matter. Installing water-saving taps in Zürich is almost certainly a net harm to the environment.
This is one of those cases where we fly by and don't think much about it because we live in a plentiful environment. The more detailed we get, the more we realize that everything has a cost, and wasting water is not free as in beer. Have we also considered the disposal costs of wastewater?
I used to live in a place where water was infinite. Fast forward 20 years, now it's not anymore, the fish bearing watersheds ultimately bear the price, but everyone is still unmetered and there isn't low flow anything. If you piss away precious resources for no good reason and claim it's not wasteful, shame on you.
Yes, I have considered the disposal costs of wastewater! Yes, I still think importing hundreds of stainless steel widgets from China and then having a plumber spend who knows how many hours installing them is almost certainly a net negative. If you piss away precious resources doing that then shame on you.
But it says in your article, "We record a demo and dent Akash’s car while recording, just minutes before the deadline." So I think the only thing to do now is to own up to it and please post the demo including the crash so that we can all have a good laugh, and also appreciate the demo that got you into YC?
That is too funny. So we crash the car while distracted, filming the demo for AI powered voice email we do during our commute, and "Judges love the demo". Pretty funny when nobody gets hurt, not so funny when we rear end a family of 4 or injure a pedestrian.
It's a controversial story, generates buzz. But as usual, the human cost seems to fall by the wayside along the way. You need brainpower to process email, right? Can people really drive properly while trying to focus on something else? Seems like the answer is instantly no, and they are still in YC. Makes me a little sick.
I think the funny part is they continue on promoting the service as something you can do while you drive after having failed at it. Plenty of value in the service, but the while you drive part would have been something I kept to myself after having had an accident doing it
You need brainpower to process music, right? Can people really drive properly while trying to focus on something else, like the radio? Or a podcast? Or a phone call with another actual human being over Bluetooth?
I love having deep conversations with fellow passengers while driving long distances. I've never felt like it distracted me while driving. I'd be curious to see any research to the contrary.
My hunch is that the moment some form of technology gets involved there is some form of interaction that has a detrimental impact. Maybe pushing a button or glancing at a screen or something else?
adults passengers can adapt the conversation to your needs, keeping quiet and even helping with decisions.
screens, kids, dogs, people on the phone, etc can't do that
Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
Surface level thinking, ecological disaster in the making. Birds and bats and other bugs eat mosquitoes to live. Killing all the mosquitoes is like the Chinese killing all the sparrows. We do not understand, and we do not want to understand, the deep consequences of our actions.
People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve.
Better option, if you really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
In general I agree that messing with ecosystems sometimes has unpredictable consequences.
In the case of mosquitos, though, they cause so much suffering, that it would be stupid to not work on eradicating them because of possible negative consequences.
We have to be careful, of course (widespread use of insecticides is a problem), but targeted measures are really unlikely to cause more harm than mosquitos already do.
Yeah well mosquitoes should definitely be made extinct btw but there’s no way a robot that kills bugs in your back yard is going to accomplish that so you can put your pitchfork down
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
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