Cheaper small-battery EVs aren’t exactly replacing petrol cars either. The real future is plug-in hybrids. All the fuel savings of a short range EV and none of the range anxiety or slow mid-day refueling.
> we found that the total annualised cost (including capital, operation, maintenance and fuel where relevant) of the least-cost renewable energy system is $7-10 billion per year higher than that of the “efficient” fossil scenario. For comparison, the subsidies to the production and use of all fossil fuels in Australia are at least $10 billion per year. So, if governments shifted the fossil subsidies to renewable electricity, we could easily pay for the latter’s additional costs.
They are claiming that a 100% renewable system would be CHEAPER than a fossil fuel system. If that doesn’t stink like some grade A bullshit to you I have nothing more to add.
That's an Australian academic in 2013 making that claim, and fair play to him, the official Australian cost estimates in 2024 say:
> ‘Firming costs’ is a term often used to describe the investments needed to make variable renewables a reliable source of electricity for our power system. In the GenCost report our preferred term is ‘integration costs’.
> Integration costs include investments in storage, peaking generation, transmission and system security devices such as synchronous condensers. Modelling determines the most cost-effective combination of these investments.
> ... renewables were still found to have the lowest cost range of any new build technology.
> For more detail go to the GenCost 2023-24 report section 5.2.1 Framework for calculating variable renewable integration costs on page 65.
Lol because you’re citing it. A study is not a magic spell you cast to immediately win arguments. Every study makes assumptions and you have to be prepared to discuss and defend them if you cite one. Another basic question, how much energy storage does their model require, because its probably way less that would actually be required. For comparison, this study of Germany found 56 TWh of storage to be optimal assuming a hypothetical and very cheap hydrogen storage system.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8#...
As far as I can tell, anti-nuclear people either have a very shallow understanding of energy and can’t really have a conversation with you using well sourced numbers or they can but know the numbers show that nuclear is the only realistic choice and either way they just respond without numbers in very short and easy to repeat (and incorrect) arguments like “storage” and “bigger grids”.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists’ first choice would be to let people freeze to death. That being politically untenable their second choice is to continue using fossil fuels as the baseload and offset it as much as possible with renewables. They think nuclear is “an excuse” to continue the “business as usual” of affordable energy. They want energy to be unavailable and expensive. They oppose human progress and economic development as itself evil, even if the environmental impact is zero. Making energy expensive is their goal, not something they reluctantly accept. All the counter productive positions and bad arguments make perfect sense when you realize that they simply have a totally different goal from you.
>Increasing the density of jobs, hospitals, restaurants, homes, schools, and more is key … as density grows mass transit becomes essential
This guy has it all backwards. No developer in his right mind is going to plow billions of dollars into high density housing without existing rail access. The new subway and commuter lines have to be built first, then the high density development becomes viable around it.
Both what you say and what the article says is right.
To the article's point, in urban areas, increased density often happens even when mass transit isn't expanded (which then often leads to ever worsening traffic). So, for urban areas that are organically becoming denser, mass transit becomes ever more important, which was partially the article's point in the section you quoted.
Also, to generously read the article, it seems to be making two related points, but not actually imposing a "one should follow the other" ordering that you read into it. The full paragraph:
> Globally, that is nothing notable—in most urban cores a majority of workers take public transportation for work and daily activities. Increasing the density of jobs, hospitals, restaurants, homes, schools, and more is key to the agglomeration effects that make cities such economic powerhouses, and as density grows mass transit becomes essential since it can far surpass the maximum throughput capacity of even the largest roadways.
It is saying two things: 1) high density is critical to be an economic powerhouse and 2) mass transit becomes even more essential as density increases. That paragraph isn't inherently saying mass transit should follow densification (vs preceding densification). Ideally you build out mass transit in anticipation of densification vs playing catch up.
Anyway, to your point, it's absolutely true that building out mass transit is critical in attracting more high-density development (especially very high-density development), and critical in enabling high density development in places that otherwise might not attract that sort of investment.
Not living in the USA, but I have never heard of the idea of a city drawing transportation lines to an empty area in anticipation of new buildings. Transportation is always reactive in my experience, especially if we're talking about costly things like metro lines or trams. You can't predict what will attract people to some area, so building a line to nowhere and expecting developers to move there because an unused line now exists is a waste of public money.
The reason places like Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore have such great public transport is precisely because the rail planners work hand in hand with urban planners. Railway construction is largely financed by property sales (both residential and commercial) and when done well is hugely profitable, as the former richest man in the world, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi of the Seibu Corporation, can attest.
Retroactively building a subway line in an already densely populated area is a hugely expensive exercise, as most recently demonstrated in NYC itself with the 2nd Ave extension.
I think this is pretty commonly known, but the railroads built the US American West. It was a hugely speculative endeavor where railroad companies would buy up worthless land for cheap, hire unfavored immigrants and work them harder than anyone else would work, and then recoup costs by selling the land of the railroad towns.
The ongoing transit expansions in Stockholm were green-lit on condition that the municipalities getting increased transit access would invest in building housing in the vicinity of that transit.
You can definitely predict what will attract people to an area - rapid access to everything that the downtowns of cities provide is one such thing.
My wife and I were going to a graduation party in Maryland and figured we’d stay in a hotel near the end of the metro line and ride into DC to see the National Mall, Union Square, etc.
The Shady Grove end of the red line has a large development of mixed commercial and residential of buildings that are uniformly about 5 stories (I think) tall that was built to go with the transit line, I understand it is like that in Virginia too.
China is famous for building metros before building the rest of the city.
Land near public transport services is generally prime real estate. The only developers who wouldn't jump on this opportunity are the ones that hate money.
At a certain point in time, building new streetcar lines and "streetcar suburbs" along those lines was fairly common in US cities. Often the property developer and the streetcar operator were the same company or ownership:
Most of those have since had the streetcar lines removed or abandoned as cheap cars and gas replaced them, and the incentive for the original developer to maintain them went away.
The lower mainland (just outside Vancouver) has the Millenium Line extension. It was, when planned and built, called a train to nowhere. It doesn't go to nowhere anymore :)
One way to do it is for the transit authority itself to build a large amount of real estate next to or over the new station and lease it out. The costs are front-loaded, though, so a large amount of financing (like selling bonds) will be needed.
It's a chicken egg problem... as usual there is no right solution. China is the largest example of building transit infrastructure first, my understanding is that there are a lot of issues there, but most of them are due to how the effort was structured. On the other hand when housing is built first there is a lot of demand for transit infrastructure, but it becomes extremely hard and expensive as seen in every metro area in USA.
In East Asia the problem is that the developments are so good, and nearly always get done with support for infrastructure that there are so many cronies in the government or with insider knowledge that can make bank off the outcome. Leads to some serious issues.
I highly, highly doubt it would be harder for those problems to happen here. In fact I think if it ever happened, it would be a huge corrupt mess.
> This guy has it all backwards. No developer in his right mind is going to plow billions of dollars into high density housing without existing rail access.
this is the default option? build a big complex with a courtyard, then surround it with a parking lot or dedicate 1/4 of the building to a garage.
I'm interested to see what happens with the new potomac yards wmata stop. I appreciate they are trying to expand rail in anticipation of growth, but it looks kinda dumb right now. it's a good 15 minute walk through parking lots to get to the nearest store or apartment building. you would never use that stop if you could afford a car. to be fair, the station just opened. it could look very different in 5-10 years. if they waited for it to densify first, people might be complaining about how much more expensive the station was.
If this is true, then why has almost the entire US worked to make it illegal to build high density housing? Presumably they wouldn't have bothered if nobody was trying to build it?
I understand why Google would shut down an expensive gambit like Stadia, but cheap good-will projects like RSS and Podcasts? Why not just keep them running for PR alone? How expensive could they possibly be to run?
I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music. They have to cut the cruft eventually. Given the numbers cited in the article (23% listen to podcasts through YouTube Music, 4% through Podcasts), YouTube Music made more sense from the business perspective. I would imagine that is especially true when you consider that they can promote more products through YouTube Music.
That said, I somehow doubt that many people are going to transition from Podcasts to YouTube Music. There are too many alternatives out there, alternatives that would likely reflect the interests of Podcasts users better. Heck, nearly three quarters of podcast consumers are already using those products.
> I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music.
Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?
Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally.
Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way.
> Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?
Slightly more realistic examples would be "spreadsheets and databases" or "spreadsheets and word processors". Plenty of people use a spreadsheet when data is represented in a tabular format, even when it isn't the most appropriate tool. (Tangentially, I've also heard of 4x games referred to as spreadsheet games. Though that's more of a description of play style than presentation!)
Don't get me wrong. I agree that podcasts shouldn't be jammed in with music. At least for myself. Yet when Google's numbers are saying that about a quarter of people access podcasts through YouTube, there are clearly a lot of people who do not agree!
They made the same calculation with Google Play Music and "merged" it into Youtube Music. Not to worry, they migrated all my music over! Except most of the Youtube "Music" was people's personal uploads of dubious quality. I ended up moving to Spotify instead.
Each engineer gets paid something around 200k-500k all in depending on seniority. I doubt just 1 team worked on this product given the bureaucracy of big tech companies like google. So why shell out millions of dollars in salary per year when the product isn’t making money?
Even worse. What engineer goes to Google and wants to be stuck on a maintenance project? No advancement potential. At best usable to claim you were a googler.
Google is basically split into "build things that make users happy" teams and "build things that make Google money" teams, so I think that on an individual product level you may be correct, but in aggregate at the high level Google believes there is a ton of value in revenue-less products.
Now for Podcasts (or any given product) there's always going to be some calculus of "is it enough value to justify the cost", and clearly Google believes the answer here is no.
Really depends on "how many people". Also if its roughly the same group of people they're making angry over and over, and they don't see an impact to the bottom line, then I'd say the answer is "pretty small", at least relative to Google's size (at which its all about volume)
Maybe part of the problem is paying people 200-500K for this kind of job? Is it written in stone at all products require that kind of "skill" to function?
The problem is not that. The problem is that managers will insist that businesses are in danger if they face any competition.
Of course, the only thing that's really in danger is the careers (and egos) of those managers. Internal competition would be an extremely good source of information on the performance of the business those managers manage.
"I can't count that low" is less of a joke than it sounds. Google's approach to developing software and products is great for ensuring that everything they make can scale up, but is terrible for scaling down and minimizing the maintenance work required for a small service.
Mature products don't have enough scope for Google engineers to get good performance reviews.
Maybe you could spin up a lower tier of engineers who aren't on the same career track and exist only to maintain mature/deprecated products, but that could come with its own set of problems.
My understanding is that the codebase was partially shared with Google+, which was a corporate priority. But having to check changes against both reduced velocity so the easiest thing was to just kill Google Reader which didn't have much love in Google' C-suite.
[new] eyewitness testimony that challenges the US intelligence community assessment that it’s “very unlikely” Havana Syndrome is the work of a foreign adversary.
So its still just people saying their headache was a directed energy beam with no actual evidence.
“Two major National Institutes of Health studies … found no consistent evidence of brain injury”
Yes, but it is the privilege of the people who pioneer a new human endeavor to name things and pick its arbitrary standards and inform those choices with their beliefs. I would prefer people simply register their disagreement if the issue comes up instead of seeking out trivial historical artifacts of previous social norms.
