Weapons proliferation is definitely a strike against nuclear. A few other strikes:
- It still requires mining, so is it any cleaner than solar + storage?
- Waste is significantly less recyclable than other green energy waste.
- High cost and long timelines to build.
- Major risks when damaged by weather, accidents, or damaged intentionally.
- The biggest proponents of nuclear seem to be the oil/gas industry, and politicians aligned with oil/gas. Hmm...
When I was a young teen, I volunteered at the local YMCA to help set up a "haunted house" (actually a squash court) for Halloween. One of the decorations I pulled out of a storage closet was a display skeleton. I set it up and was having fun playing around with it when I noticed it had some metal fillings in the teeth...and everything was a bit TOO realistic.
I'd like to give it a respectful burial, without causing a police response.
Unfortunately that's not an option.
A respectful burial means contacting the authorities so that the remains can be properly identified, and their final disposition noted in the public record. Remember this was once a human being, likely with many relations, however far back. The remains could be of someone entirely forgotten, but could be the missing link in some family's long and painfully sad story, also.
Meanwhile, the tail risk of getting into some kind of trouble for attempting to sidestep this necessary process is quite considerable.
So there's really only one course of action available to your father's heirs. Since there's also a small but considerable chance of being hit with some kind of charge (even if you do contact the authorities in perfectly good faith, and presuming of course that no hanky panky was involved in acquiring the skeleton on the first place), the first step will be to contact a criminal defense lawyer.
Right, but contacting authorities implies automatically a significant chance that the police will be contacted also (no matter what they might say to you initially).
Once that happens, you have no control over their response.
I was going to look this up to verify, but realized googling "do they still sell actual human..." probably isn't something I want in my search history. So, I'll just say, as a not-noo-fuzzy-recollection, I'm pretty certain that to this day some people who's bodies are donated to science may end up as actual educational props for medical students. In that light, the above thoughts about wanting/needing to track down this person and contact families seems unnecessary as that person did this intentionally.
That said, I absolutely recall seeing a documentary, in modern day, showing people's bodies used in science exhibits to this day. Their point was that while people had voluntarily donated their body to science, they were mostly unaware that this type of display was something that might happen.
What about calling the med school back? They may have a use for it for teaching (as your dad did), and if not, it should be a question they are familiar with.
Tesla superchargers are rarely down. Not sure what they’re doing differently, but it shows that EV chargers CAN be reliable, but a lot of companies haven’t figured it out yet.
This has been changing since Musk fired the supercharger team. I found one location where the entire set was nonfunctional and no indication in the car app.
Yes, about 2000 moving parts in a combustion engine compared to 20 in an electric motor. The only reason ICE cars are comparable in price is the 100 years of supply chain competition.
EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
More rural places without electrification are the big long term use until renewable tech becomes better and significantly cheaper.
In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer.
Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot.
Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
Other future imagining: a bunch of wrecked or old EV's being used for their battery capacity, buffering power from solar. Charge station of old cars holding juice for new ones.
But you can replace any of those 2000 moving parts with same one from eBay. You can either make your own if you know how. You can't change DRM locked part unless it is a new one and installed by approved technician using approved software for installation. Have you been naughty boy? No parts for you.
Ok name an EV part you can be a DRM asshole with and tell me the mechanism by which you're enforcing the DRM and I'll bet it's equally enforceable with a similar mechanism on the gas vehicle.
Gas tank can be behind DRM, just as a battery can be.
They're both naturally rather simple affairs: In their most primitive forms, a fuel tank is just a container that holds fuel, and a battery is just a collection of cells.
But nothing at all prevents either thing from being rather more complex than that with the inclusion of necessary electronics that are DRM-locked.
I didn't say there weren't also parts that aren't on a communication network, in both types of car. This is a silly line of argument.
It's no easier, or harder: There are components in both systems that rely on network communication which could easily be vendor-locked by a central computer.
I am a fan of a carbon tax, but one issue I’ve never seen addressed by proponents is the regressive structure of the tax. Oftentimes the poorest areas are using the most carbon-intensive energy sources and thus stand to be hurt the most by a carbon tax. There is little the average poor person can do to avoid this Similar logic applies for, e.g. EV subsidies - the people most capable of dishing out the cash to secure a subsidy are those in the financially best positions.
Within a given area rich people tend to use more carbon. Poor people are less likely to be taking international flights, etc.
Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.
Rich people can afford electric cars while poor people won’t be able to, even if the car is used, through the next decade. If anything, SUV prices will drop like a rock…
Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.
We agree, this is why I am not a huge fan of subsidies for EV's. Among other things, we should be encouraging fewer cars of all sorts. I do like ebike subsidies though, and better public transport.
Similarly, it can make sense to help people improve their home's efficiency, and in some places grants are available for this (insulation, etc.). Though in many cases you're using renters' taxes to make the homeowner wealthier, which isn't really fair.
In Canada we get a carbon tax rebate, fixed per-head. A family of four will get up to $1800 in 2024-25, and rural areas get more than everyone else. High income households consume more of everything than low income households overall, so they still pay more carbon tax in absolute terms. Meanwhile the tax rebate is not income based. It balances out some of the regressiveness of the carbon tax.
EV subsidies can help build demand for the vehicles. As adoption grows, charging becomes more widely available and manufacturing costs come down with volume.
The issue is that they do not work. If your constituents made bad investments and are stuck with oil heating because they heard that solar is woke on Fox, you cannot actually have them face the consequences of their actions. You will either not be elected or the media response will be so bad that you won't be able to govern. You will have to bail them out or add exemptions
This is easily solved. Particularly as industry is such a large contributor to GHG emissions, imposing a carbon tax on industry and possibly even allowing grandfathering allows the costs to be baked in to (only) future considerations, and makes cleaner companies more competitive compared to dirtier ones.
Baking them into future decisions will not be enough. Sorry, if people made bad investments it will teach them to be smarter. Accomodations can only go so far to be effective.
It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.
Who cares about the optimal climate, we just need the rate of change to remain at a low enough level that nature (including humans) can adapt. We seem to be on the edge of that limit already.
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