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Comment Re:Dear president trump (Score 2) 110

All these green contraptions and inventions mostly are bogus, because producing them negates the benefits.

Basically, not true. There is, of course, an energy cost to making pretty much anything. Cars. Your shirt. A solar panel. But that cost is a one time cost.

Burning fuel to produce energy, on the other hand, incurs a continuous cost. Every day-- every second-- you are making energy, you must keep burning fuel. This results in a cumulative cost. Cumulative costs overwhelm the one-time cost.

And... the cost of making solar panels, and for that matter wind turbines, keeps getting cheaper as the manufacturing technology gets better. And, yes, that includes the energy cost.

Comment CO2 per kw-hr [Re:Energiewende] (Score 3, Informative) 129

> We can argue over the number

No, I will not argue over objective facts. Sorry not sorry, your talking point are out of date.

Data is here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eea.europa.eu%2Fen%2Fa...

Germany is high in terms of CO2/kw-hr, but not the highest in Europe. Germany has dropped their CO2/kw-hr by 37 percent since 2010, so it is at last improving. France, as OP noted, is considerably lower.

Comment Re: Energiewende (Score 2) 129

Nuclear is not even "CO2 free". Mining, refinement and transport of the fuel creates a lot of CO2. So will creating processing and long-term storage for the waste, but that CO2 has not yet manifested.

This is technically true, but the amount of CO2 produced is so miniscule compared to burning fossil fuels that to a good first approximation it is zero.

Basically, when your entire method of producing energy is by burning hydrocarbons, you produce a lot of CO2.

Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 2) 121

It's supported by a vast body of observations and consistent models grounded in well-established physics.

Too bad the climate scientists can't program. Their computer models are pure garbage.

Climate models are physics bases, and, to date, have been quite successful in predictions.
  https://yaleclimateconnections...
  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.nasa.gov%2Fearth...

Comment Re:I can see the point. (Score 2) 137

There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad.

Yes it was. That's why USENET invented moderation. The unmoderated forums were pretty horrific sometimes.

The one thing about USENET, though, is that the trolls and flamers and a$$holes were actual humans, not troll farms or click-farmers or AIs.

Comment Re:Boo Hoo (Score 0) 48

Easy to get around. GO GET A FUCKING WARRANT.

As others point out, cold cases are ones in which there is in no evidence pointing to a specific person, so, no, this is not possible.

The constitution is clear,

I would like to agree with that, but the constitution really is not clear. This is not a search of a specific person, about which the constitution is clear; it's a search of a database.

and if Ancestry wanted to just hand over the data, they would get sued out of business and probably have had to settle a few already, which is why they changed the TOS.

Wait, what? You think a serial rapist-murderer is going to sue Ancestry.com for being convicted of murder because the were identified because a cousin gave dna to Ancestry.com? That would be laughed out of court.

Comment Re:H2 is a bugger to work with (Score 4, Informative) 48

I mean who wouldn't want to use a famously volatile element in a closed system resembling a bomb that said element will be leaking from and be exposed to insane temperatures.

Because the JTEC is an evolved version of the older AMTEC, Alkali Metal Thermal-to-Electric Converter, in which the working fluid was liquid sodium. The version with hydrogen is much easier to work with. AMTEC looked great in small-scale lab experiments, and for a while in the 90s they were heavily pushed as the successor technology to thermoelectrics currently used in radioisotope power systems, but turned out they were too hard to work with. (I still kinda like the technology, though. It's thermodynamically elegant.)

There's also a JTEC variant that uses oxygen, I believe: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchwithrutger...

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