GiuseppeAndTheYeti

Well, there's obviously going to be a lot of angles to that question but initial cost and the fact that large scale battery farms aren't necessarily needed right now stick out to me.

The grid as it is designed right now is capable of producing power at demand simply by spinning up more generators. There's no cost benefit (really) to generating extra power and dealing with logistics of storage while the extra power is not needed. Not at statewide scale and while the infrastructure isn't built already.

Let's for a second assume that a power company at statewide scale wasn't able to just spin up more generators to meet demand and there IS incentive to provide storage. The company looking at the market today has 2 choices. Buy batteries that provide a versatile/portable solution with no real local consequence OR spend money developing and engineering molten salt or pumped water storage.

Electrochemical batteries:

• Pros: rapid installation, available market for part replacement, resellable, cheap to repair, energy dense, variable discharge, no significant R&D, negligible local environmental concerns
• Cons: less reliability, finite resource reliance (rare earths) can cause repair and replacement costs to increase, global environmental concerns, local weather systems can more easily damage infrastructure, limited cycles

Gravity and thermal batteries:

• Pros: renewable or abundant recourses depending on location, reliable and simple, efficiency increases with scale, difficult to damage irreparably, fewer global environment concerns
• Cons: large amount of R&D financial cost/time to account for local environmental concerns, construction and implementation could take multiple years in addition to R&D, unique systems don't allow for much resell ability, larger potential footprint, location constrained, semi-fixed discharge rate, fewer partner companies to provide unique part replacement options, potential impact to local families in the event of failure (Taum Sauk).

I want to make it clear that I don't really agree that nuclear is bad. In any shape or form fusion and fission are the two cleanest sources of energy that we have and are the sources of energy humankind will need to guarantee our survival as a species.

However, there are clean batteries. Battery is just a term for potential energy storage and things like gravity batteries and thermal batteries are feasible right now. Electrochemical batteries aren't the only type of battery that we have. Actually, they are less efficient and less reliable than the others at scale.

Really? Dumper sticker was right there...

Chernobyl was disastrous because design flaws were not relayed to the plant engineers. It took years of roadblocked research to find out what had happened. Even the man that had helped to design the RBMK reactor did not consider a meltdown was possible because the xenon that ended up poisoning the reactor would burn off under normal circumstances.

The meltdown could have been prevented if not for the soviet government inexplicably withholding critical information about the reactor from it's own engineers.

I'm annoyed about this whole story, the guy claims to never have sailed before and is crossing the Pacific ocean in like a 25 foot boat. The ocean isn't forgiving. A single storm would be more than capable of capsizing his vessel in the open ocean. What he's doing is reckless, dangerous, and inconsiderate of his close friends and family.

I've no idea how arancini have not migrated across the globe. It's unbelievable. My first time encountering it was at a local pizza place in Rome. It's a little off the tourists locations, but its called 'Mastro Donato Pizza Gourmet'. If ever you're in Rome, I would highly recommend.

Nah, fuck this sentiment. Force a vote and be loud about every law that they break. If there's a contingency of congress that are going to be obtuse about resisting fascism, then they can face the disgruntled mass of voters in the next election. If Dickhead Durbin hadn't already decided he's not going to run for reelection I'd be voting him and Tammy Duckworth out for compromising on Republican policies. Instead I'll only get the pleasure of voting against Tammy in the primaries.

It really doesn't matter when the number is that large and its the ethics of accepting such a valuable gift anyway. My main concern other than ethics is that it's going to cost taxpayers a significant amount more to retrofit the plane with defense systems, communications, and redundancies than to just build it that way from scratch. Plus they'll need to verify security of electrical components and systems as well. All of that will be done on our dime since it will be the Air Force performing all of that.

Every state gets their cut somehow. Illinois' property tax is just Missouri's personal property tax or Florida's sale tax. There's fluctuations that encourage certain economic activity or attracts people with certain financial situations, but for the most part any variance in the total tax burden is probably weighed out by the benefits of those taxes. In Illinois roads are (somehow) much better than in Missouri despite having probably tens of thousands miles more, education is better, public health is way better, etc. The big one is welfare for farmers down state when crops fail due to flooding or drought.They're ungrateful little bitches about it(I know because I grew up there) but everyone should have a sense of financial stability if they're contributing to society.

You may well have a chance. I think he would be a great presidential candidate, but there is a sticking point. I fear that a nonsignificant amount of people who haven't been hearing about his actions would vote against him or abstain based on his billionaire status.

At the very least you can mute the tab

To give you some hope, I use gesture navigation on my android and to go back I swipe from the right. Problem is, that's also the gesture for downvoting in the Voyager app. There's been multiple times that I've been done reading comments and want to go back to my feed, so I swipe to got back and accidentally downvote at the same time. Normally I go back into the thread and undo my downvote but I'd bet that I've missed it before. It's subtle when it happens and it happens often enough that it's probably once or twice a scrolling session.