I don't know anything at all about this technology, I'd not heard about it before. I came to the comments to find out if it was relying on liquification of CO2, which I assumed, or was something else.

First point to note, 80 bar isn't high pressure in an industrial setting and 30C is low enough that there's large parts of Europe where you can assume that ambient air temperature almost never exceeds it. Therefore passive cooling is possible and in many cases, forced air cooling will be is sufficient. (I liquified CO2, indoors, in the summer months, as an undergraduate in the UK with only passive cooling required. I don't recall the exact pressure but it was around 60bar which suggests the indoor temperature was around 20C.)

A long pipe passive atmospheric heat exchanger is almost certainly all that is needed, much like the radiator on domestic fridge.

You don't mention it but the decompression cycle is likely more problematic as, I would guess, ice buildup might restrict the ability to use passive or forced air heating unless you're using dehumidified air (which you might be anyway to avoid corrosion). You also need to avoid the CO2 freezing.

Long term storage - while I suspect this technology isn't intended for long term storage and is expected to cycle in a few days, storing liquid CO2 isn't a problem. CO2 cylinders will store gas for months even after first use. It's not like helium where without incredibly careful setup, you'll lose all the gas overnight once you break the factory seal.

Likewise impurities, The initial loading of the CO2 will require a pure gas and you'll want water vapour in particular excluded. Trace amounts of nitrogen and oxygen probably aren't going to be a problem (I don't know about how they affect the critical temperature, it might be that they also have to be totally excluded but that just makes initial loading harder). But it's not hard to produce equipment that is impervious to CO2, N2, O2, Ar and H2O that can maintain integrity at 100bar (you've got about a 40:1 safety factor for steel at 100bar). If trace amounts of impurity are a problem then you'll probably need to bake the equipment to flush out the adsorbed gasses but I'd guess flushing the pipework with CO2 at high temperature would be sufficient, I doubt you'd need to get to CERN levels of outgassing elimination.

Manufacturers in China have enjoyed a distinct advantage in in lax environmental regulations, low material costs and labor rates compared to US. US manufacturing is competitive on the high end. We just cannot compete with cheap volume manufacturing.

I suspect US manufacturing can compete at much of the low end now as labour costs is becoming almost irrelevant to much of it.

However, the up front cost to build a fully automatic factory is substantial, and it requires constant ongoing capital investment to stay useful. You may not recoup your investment unless you can stay useful for 10 years and initial orders may have an estimated run time of 6 months.

One of the things that would help, but is one of the things that seems anathema to western corporations, is standardisation, A fan motor fails in a laptop, it's usually reasonable simple to replace except that that motor is specific to that particular model of that particular laptop from that particular manufacturer and your best source of parts might be a "not working" laptop of ebay.

There is certainly a case for custom parts like motors in some cases but most of the time, like arbitrary power plugs, it's to benefit the manufacturer and force obsolescence earlier.

Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight. Perhaps there's nothing suitable, then you have to have a custom part, but then there can be a "custom part tax" - high enough that manufacturers won't ignore it, but low enough that genuine use cases aren't prohibited until the next round of standardisation.

Even washing machines. I have a small kitchen and there is a space for a washing machine but there's no possibility of rearranging things to make more space. This is an absolutely standard (European) sized space. 20 years ago pretty much every washing machine would have fitted. Now lots don't, and even worse, manufacturers/retailers make it hard to tell if a replacement will actually fit. It's not at all uncommon in the UK to visit someone's house and discover a washing machine that is sticking out from the cupboard line by 8cm or so - because "I assumed it was a standard size and would fit". In larger houses it's theoretically, if not financially, possible to replace the entire kitchen with deeper worktops, but in smaller places this can be impossible.

You don't. The CO2 is reused.

Yes and no. It was always a solution based on a lot of ifs. If capacity of EV batteries remains low, and if charging speeds remain low too, it might be a viable solution (and manufacturers like Nio and Tesla at least implemented the possibility). 10 years ago, those ifs were very present.

But both problems are solved now. You can buy a 180 kWh battery for some EVs already, albeit I would not, given the price, but even standard EVs come with 300 miles ranges. And 4C charging (4 times capacity within an hour) is available, and 6C charging is on display for some EV models, which means charging from 10% to 80% within 6 mins. Given that you need fast charging mainly on long distance trips, you will on average spend less time charging your EV than refueling a gasoline car.

This pulls the rug under battery swapping schemes.

When was the last time you went to a movie theater? The one thing I find most notable about 2025 compared to the previous century is that the previous cheap fold-down seats in movie theaters have been replaced by wide, comfortable seats with plenty of legroom. In most of the theaters built recently the seats recline as well.

For the most part, you also choose your seat when you buy your ticket online, so if the only seats available are in undesirable positions relative to the screen, go to a different show.

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

The key thing that somebody reported was a suspicious gray Nissan. Once they zeroed in on looking for a grey Nissan at the crime scene, they looked at the surveillance cameras, found one that had in the right place at the right time, and used the Flock cameras and license plate readers to discover it was also present in Brookline at the MIT professor's shooting, then used the Flock cameras to follow it to the storage facility.

Maybe "regular police work" could have followed it through the change of license plates to a facility two states away, but maybe not. You do know not all crimes are solved.

I'm not sure why you think that. America does have this political belief that the government shouldn't be doing research, but should instead fund outside entities to do so, in the belief that outside entities are more efficiently run. NCAR, of course, reports to the National Science Foundation, why do you think it would somehow be different or run "more efficiently" if it were "absorbed" by the NSF?

What in the world do you find "shady" about it?

What in the world are you talking about? There are many government agencies for which the budget has no accountability-- when the military misplaces a billion dollars, their response is "Well, it hard to keep track of everything," but the NCAR budget is public and completely transparent.

Interesting link, thanks!

The war against using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" was lost years ago. Even the dictionaries have conceded, although I'm amused that the definition 2 in the web Merriam-webster actually uses the word "literally" to mean "literally" in the text of the definition of "literally" meaning "not literally."

2 informal : in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible
I literally died of embarrassment.
" will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice."—Norman Cousins

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merriam-webster.co...

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.

Your "junk" is someone else's "must-have".
Your "must-have" is someone else's "junk".

Here it is https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmegnut.com%2F2007%2F05%2F16%2F...

When people are starving, it is the calorie value that is the problem.