The Core

Very interesting. More reversible rusting.

Interesting that it comes into play both for hydrogen storage and chemical batteries

BTW, the source article linked from the article in RC’s post is better. The GNN version gets some basics wrong. For example it says the station will be made up of 50 washer/dryer sized modules. That’s not what the source article says at at all (and the small size was what I thought was most surprising). Actually each module has 50 cells, the the source article says nothing about the number of modules at the station.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/worlds-biggest-battery-coming-to-maine-130-million-times-more-energy-laptop

loses up to 60 percent of energy in the conversion steps.

Meanwhile, assuming that we store our solar energy in form of compressed dead ferns and dinosaurs stored deep underground...

Typical thermal efficiency for utility-scale electrical generators is around 37% for coal and oil-fired plants, and 56 – 60% (LEV) for combined-cycle gas-fired plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station

And that doesn't include losses related to extraction, transport, refinement, transport again.

A human on a bicycle, by the way, is only 10-20% efficient, with the rest of the energy being lost to heat.

So, yes, you just need to have a lot more energy than you plan to use whether that energy is coming
 
- from the sun and getting converted into electricity and then into rust, or...

 - from the sun via a highly convoluted and inefficient process of being made into ferns and dinosaurs and being converted underground under massive heat and pressure then extracted millions of years later or..

 -  from the sun via chlorophyll making solar energy into glucose and creating bananas (or in a two-step process whereby it then gets converted very inefficiently into grass then into burger storage units) and having the bicycle power plant eat them and convert them to fat and glycogen. We're talking h-bikes here, obviously, as g-bikes and e-bikes fall into the first two scenarios.

I don't think so. He bought it on leverage and, as I understand it, needs it to run in the black. He, of course, could keep it alive by selling Tesla if there is anyone who can afford to buy it, but I don't think he has the cash flow to just keep it running as a hobby project that loses tens of millions of dollars per year.

>> Maybe the best model is forums that require a token monthly fee

The exercise and nutrition spaces are full of trolls and charlatans. The person in question (Alan Couzens) said he was tired of wading through trolls and figured none of them would pay $5/month. He also made the call to run it on Discourse which requires a pretty powerful Google whatever instance (already had to bump up and the forum gets maybe a 15-25 posts a day).

Of course, there is this :-)
https://th3core.com/talk/marketing/travoli's-prediction-of-'everything-will-be-subscription'/

I do get weary of subscriptions and I don't know whether I will pay long-term for that forum. I mostly wanted to make sure he had a successful launch. I do a similar thing with some people on Patreon where I'll do a year or maybe two.

The problem for me is that there are maybe 40 people/teams on Substack or doing podcasts or whatever that I think deserve $5 or $10/month for what they have given me. But at an average of $7.50/mo, that's $300/month.

Or put another way, are 2-3 Substacks per month (typical min price is about $7) worth more than the WSJ ($4/week) or NYT ($25/four weeks) or, for that matter, Netflix?

Sorry about the discouraging job search.

The low pay for PPC surprises me. That strikes me as an area where someone with knowledge has immediate positive ROI and the difference between good and bad is large.

The low pay for SEO doesn't. It is very hard to move the needle quickly and cheaply now, barring deep technical issues, and that is what SEOs promised for so long (and delivered into the early 2010s maybe). What I see is SEO firms that do perfunctory keyword research, suggest some change to an H1 here or adding some phrase in the text here. Often the phrases they suggest adding make no sense. And for this they charge a buttload of money.

It reminds me of something a street musician said once. His riff went something like this: "Someone came up to me the other day and said, 'You're pretty good.' I said, 'If I were great, would you be able to tell? Most people can't, but there's a difference and, actually, I'm great.'"

It was a schtick, but it was true - I've seen big Vegas magic shows that didn't wow me like this guy. He was great.

Anyway, I suspect a lot of the issue is that most of the people offering low wages don't know the difference between someone who hardly knows anything and someone who is great, so they don't see why they should pay for great (and fees are typically more an indicator of agency size than agency skill, so they've absorbed that lesson too).

Wow!  That’s pretty sad

>> procurement process

I think this is a big issue.
 - stakeholders in the military who want their expensive, but now obsolete, projects built
 - stakeholders in Congress who want those projects in their district to continue
 - stakeholders in industry who want to keep their contracts

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.

-- Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Jan 17, 1961

The new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) is built on the same underlying technology as Google Chrome

Understood. But MS had the resources to build a good browser and if they had done it, it might be Chrome and/or Firefox that would be using the MS rendering engine.

Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, just before IE6 launched and when MS controlled most of the desktop browser share. Though the big issue with IE was standards compatibility, to be fair, standards were in flux through that period and MS was pushing browsers forward. Chrome didn't launch until 2008

During that entire interval, MS launched one browser: IE7, and that not even until 2006. Then it was just ridiculous the crap they launched for the next several years under Ballmer's tenure (ended in 2014).

This is Ballmer's legacy. If MS had had a competent CEO from 2000 to 2014, I think Chrome would have less market share than Safari on desktop.