I'm curious about this too. I don't understand the properties of CO2 but if you're compressing the gas, it heats up (PV=nRT). But you don't want to waste that heat, that's the energy you're trying to store. IIRC, condensing a gas to a liquid also releases heat so I don't understand the energy flows.

The company site has a nice animation of how this works. It's a closed cycle: CO2 is never released into the atmosphere, it's just liquified and evaporated.

To make sure everyone is clear, this is an energy storage system, not a generator. The power has to come from somewhere else, e.g. solar panels which are producing more energy than is needed during the day and less than needed at night.

I don't think it's that straightforward. The Chief Executive has some control over the agency in that the executive gets to nominate members. But regulatory agencies have both a legislative and executive function so it's not entirely clear which branch they should belong to. And I don't think we want to preclude independent agencies just because the Founding Fathers didn't consider them in 1787.

Pragmatically, the law both Congress and the President agreed to laid out the rules for how the agencies will function. The agreement at the time was the President would only have limited authority over the agency. That's a political calculation and the sort of thing courts are reticent to get involved in..

Eh, I don't know about that. If I'm looking for something to watch, a list of Oscar winners isn't a bad place to start. Winning an Oscar does not guarantee the film is good but it's an indication it's worth considering.

That said, I remember finding awards shows dull back in the '80s, when the shows were still a huge deal. As others have written, it's much more time efficient to watch the recap later.

This is the only case I know of. Have there been more?

I can draw any trend line I want from one data point.

Possibly. But we don't know that. The police and the Institute are quite closed-lipped about the event. I've seen no specifics and I've looked.

Could be a upset student, disgruntled staff member, political statement, jilted lover, or just a random robbery. We don't know and speculating without facts adds nothing to the conversation.

This is now a challenge. Proof by demonstration, I don't need to invent an invisibility cloak or iris scan spoofer, I just need to look for bored security guards.

As is often the case, XKCD beat us to this. The weak link in security often isn't the process or tools, it's the wetware. Nerds should bear that in mind when designing any system involving people.

Back to the original article, "embarassing" isn't the word I'd use. "Appalling", "horrifying", and "enraging" spring to mind.

A bunch of restaurants (in NYC, IIRC) tried this a few years ago. It didn't go well. I don't remember the particulars but they all dropped the "no tipping" pollicy.

People don't behave like purely rational Homo Econimus. Americans are so trained to tip that a lot of people feel bad if they don't. My guess is that's what got in the way.

Turns out this is a moot point. If you look at the slide deck, the vast majority of solar generation is utility-scale deployments. Residential is, IIRC, about 20% of new capacity.

You are correct if there's ample money to invest and no urgency to achieve a difficult result. Then you don't care how efficient your investment is. But since we're taking about not having enough electricity, how we're spending our investment dollars matters. At a macro level we could get substantially more capacity if we buy at utility scale rather than residential generation.

(Of course, it's not that simple. On one the one hand, private people are spending their own money and can buy whatever pleases them. On the other, we're talking about an asset paid for by a group of rate payers where the rates are the result of a negotiated political process. The two buckets of money are not fungible.)

I kind of care about this because I believe the city I live in, San Jose, now has a requirement for new houses that they either include residential solar or you buy a share of a utility scale solar generator. If I wanted to solve California's energy woes, I wouldn't make residential an option because I'm looking for the most bang for the buck. But the policy was instituted when residential solar was a feel good nice to have, not a solution to an immediate problem.

I believe it. I don't think I get news from Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat so I don't have a good feel for what's available.

...there are news reports of a massive spike in tiny violin sales.

For every ad-supported service, you bet it's about advertising. Netflix doesn't produce a show to put on their ad-supported tier without the advertisers wanting to know the reach of their ads. While I'm sure Netflix, Amazon, Sling, and everyone else produces metrics of what ads were inserted, reading from the display is an interesting way to cross-check the metrics.

That said, I have zero interest in participating. I want my display to be dumb as a bag of hammers.

Thanks. That's a very interesting slide deck.

That is fine for residential, which doesn't require much energy density. It doesn't take much of a business before you don't have enough area to site all the panels.

That said, I've never been convinced residential rooftop solar is the most economical way to generate electricity. I have to believe mega farms in a desert are more cost effective. I just look around my neighborhood at all the crazy angles people point their panels and just shake my head. Those panels can't possibly be producing at their peak capacity. If anyone has any numbers for the levelized cost per kWh for residential rooftop versus dedicated solar farms, I'd be interested in seeing it.

I use a coding assistant all the time now. I get far more done (and yes, I review the code before committing). That makes the labor cost of my software less. Assuming the token cost doesn't go up by much, that makes my software cheaper, which means either the products it gets embedded in are cheaper and/or I can embed software in more things.

No doubt there are many AI apps which won't pan out: just ask my wife how much she likes AI customer service desks. But we'll figure that out and those will disappear.

Technological change happens. Every time it does, tons of jobs which get destroyed. For that last 400 years, that's worked out OK in the end. We're much more prosperous now (even poor people are better off than in past centuries) and we don't have persistent unemployment. I don't see any reason to think this time is different.