"Eating salami increases your cancer risk by 25%!" When it went from 0.3% to 0.375% over your lifetime or something.

Eating 50g of cured meats every day raises the risk from about 5% to about 6% chance of getting certain gastrointestinal/colorectal cancers, compared to someone who never eats cured meats. A couple different ways to state this:

• 1% of cured meat eaters will develop cancer that they wouldn't have otherwise developed, by eating cured meat.
• There is a 20% increase in risk of cancer from eating cured meat.
• Cured meat eaters who have cancer have approximately a 16% chance of having gotten the cancer from the meat they eat.

But it's not negligible. And the causal connection is pretty strongly proven.

No, but there is a great prize for any organism that figures it out and unlocks all that plentiful energy, especially if it encodes the "recipe" for future generations.

And that's just natural selection. Artificial selection could possibly speed that up, too, if it's actually possible.

The current generation Ford Transit is pretty long (3.3 m wheelbase in the base model, 3.75 m wheelbase in the long model) and tall (2-3 meters tall), and is one I would consider to be a fairly large vehicle. At least the North America models.

I'm not sure whether a short wheelbase model was ever available in the U.S., at least under that model name.

Looking at the parent comment's truck, that looks to be a Nissan Frontier, maybe mid-2000's or so? I think that's a smaller vehicle than the contemporary Ford Transits of similar timeframe.

Either way, my point is that the development of electric drivetrains and the abandonment of fuel economy standards in the US market might actually lead to the creation of more small trucks/vans, which were difficult to justify in the previous state of the technology, the market, and the regulations. But there is a huge gap from around 2010-2025 model year for smaller vehicles in the US.

a small-medium panel van

Do you have an example of a model in mind? I suspect that those vehicles simply couldn't pass US fuel economy regulations, which paradoxically rewarded bigger vehicles with a larger fuel economy allowance, and completely hollowed out the US market for either small cars or small trucks/vans.

Yes, but most of the time, on most of the street, there isn't a person or other object absorbing sunlight from both directions. So the vast majority of the heat that would've been absorbed into some kind of temperature increase in the road itself (and surrounding air and objects) gets rejected back into the sky/space, at the cost of a little bit more sunlight being absorbed directly by the cars and people who happen to be walking by.

I like the graph but hate the colors. Too low contrast where correlating the lines to the actual country/category represented takes a lot more examination.

In many areas, fossil fuel energy is much cheaper than electrical energy, so much so that even with heat pumps operating at 300+% efficiency, it was still cheaper to burn fuel than to use a heat pump.

When piped residential gas cost $0.01/cubic foot, and each cubic foot contains 0.3 kWh of energy, that energy price was comparable to 3.3 cents per kWh. So even compared with a electric heat pump that was 300% efficient, that gas would still be cheaper than electricity that cost $0.10/kWh.

Now that gas is more expensive (national average approaching $0.02 per cubic foot), and heat pumps tend to be more efficient, some up to 500%, the simple math starts to favor electric heat pumps, where a 500% efficient heat pump running at even $0.30/kWh is still cheaper than a gas furnace. Basically, the breakeven point has tripled in just over a decade.

Also, as heat pump technology has improved, they are capable of operating efficiently at lower temperatures than before, so that the real world performance more closely matches the simple calculations in those cold climates. Plus because they work better now, the customers are less likely to notice a performance difference in heating.

What's even more annoying about that is that between the two names, Volt is more obviously electric-themed but is the less electric vehicle.

And yes, I know that the Volt came first, as the first mass market plug in hybrid in the US market, but that just made the Bolt's name even more confusing.

European honeybees protected by human beekeepers outcompete native pollinators for the nectar and pollen that these plants grow, so that the native pollinators struggle to get enough food.

Remember the bailout of General Motors? The US handed over billions of taxpayer dollars to a company that failed to invest properly in its own future, only for them to turn around and reward shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks. Where was the outrage over those subsidies?

The GM bailout wiped out shareholders, who got nothing, and their shares went permanently to zero. They created a new company, primarily as a bailout of customers (new GM assumed the responsibilities relating to warranties, service plans, connectivity/subscriptions), a partial bailout of employees (new GM accepted the collective bargaining agreement with the unions, but closed plants under the terms of that agreement), and to some extent dealers and vendors (there were individual winners and losers in the bankruptcy as a whole). Then they auctioned off the shares of the new company, to at least bring back some money to the taxpayer (recovering about $39 billion out of the $51 billion they spent on the bailout).

Economists talk about moral hazard, and the GM and AIG bailout are actually a good example of "yes we'll save you but it's gonna cost you almost as much as if we didn't."

it takes aboit 30m² of solar pannels to grow what could be grown on 1m² using direct sunlight.

Where can I read more about this? I had thought that solar panels absorb a lot more energy than plants can, and I would think that collecting energy across a wide range of wavelengths and then using that energy to emit only specific wavelengths could give plants more useful light. But I admit I don't know how each is optimized for different wavelengths.

The reason why EV motors are so high power is that unlike internal combustion engines, an electric motor being capable of high power doesn't make it less efficient during lower power use. So unlike a 1000 hp gasoline engine, an EV with 1000 hp can cruise around a city at low speeds using very little energy.

Another advantage of high power motors is that they are also high power generators for recapturing the kinetic energy in regenerative braking that charges the batteries.

This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don't think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.

So that's 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.

Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world's electricity consumption for 51 years you'd raise the oceans' temperature by 1°C.

Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you'd be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It'd take about 393 years of the world's data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.

Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.

There are a few different reasons why.

• The US already built up its rail network around low speed trains. Those tracks aren't suitable for high speed operations, and can't be modified easily for high speed operations. It's not just the tracks themselves, it's the actual paths and bridges and road crossings. If a turn is too sharp, it can't be taken at high speeds, and the actual curves in the path didn't anticipate that one day trains would be fast enough to need more gradual turns. So any new rail would have to buy up the land rights with any new pathway, and that is going to be inherently expensive in the corridors dense enough to where there might be demand for passenger rail.
• Rail crossings have to be designed for high speed rail, as well. There are safety and congestion concerns, so many high speed rail projects are required to build more grade separated crossings (bridges and tunnels), which significantly increases construction costs.
• Rail has to compete with air travel and highway travel, in a country rich enough to have lots of people who can afford to fly, and where car-based highway systems are convenient and cheap. Basically, there's a sweet spot of around 200-400 miles (300-600 km) between cities where it's far enough that a car is inconvenient and close enough to where trains are competitive with buses or airplanes.
• Along those lines, the US actually has pretty cheap intercity buses that use the existing highways.
• Unfortunately, the city pairs that would have the highest intercity passenger demand also tend to pass through a lot of other cities. If you're going from DC to New York, the most popular rail line in America, you'll pass through Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton, each with their own powerful politicians who would push to make sure the train actually stops for them. This is part of why the Acela, our fastest passenger train, takes 190 minutes to travel 226 miles between DC and New York, averaging only 70 mph (115 km/h) despite being capable of reaching top speeds of 160 mph (255 km/h).
• Most rail in the United States is owned by freight/cargo train lines. The passenger network has to lease spots and is lower priority than freight. This leads to scheduling issues, including unscheduled delays.
• Americans are just really bad at constructing big public works projects. Our dams, bridges, tall buildings, rail, highways, roads, power plants, and all sorts of other big projects are almost always behind schedule and over budget.
• The less populated areas where it's cheaper to acquire land rights also tend to be more environmentally pristine, which means there are environmental concerns around projects like these. In our political system, Republicans are much more likely to ignore those environmental concerns, but they use that political clout to build highways and oil pipelines, not passenger rail. Advocates for passenger rail tend to also be more environmentally conscious, so the environmental concerns do tend to slow down any proposed rail project.

There is high speed rail called Brightline in Florida between Miami and Orlando, with the longest segment operating at 125 mph (200 km/h), and some of the more populous segments operating at 110 mph/180 km/h or 80 mph/130 km/h. It tries to manage those tradeoffs on all new track dedicated to it. But the company is struggling to make money.

There's a whole saga in California in that the proposed high speed rail project is decades behind and still bogged down, and has examples of all of these problems. The route it takes to connect the two largest cities on the coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco) goes through the inland central valley, to service a bunch of other cities in between. Bizarrely, phase 1 of the project will only serve the relatively low density, low population cities in the Central Valley, without connecting either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Some segments are to share rail usage with lower speed trains, complicating scheduling and risking delays. The environmental debates have slowed things down, as well.

Watch what happens in Texas with its proposed high speed line (bogged down in political infighting), Florida (see above, already built and operational, but facing serious financial concerns about its ability to continue), and California (see above).

I think we'll eventually see some projects push through, especially if jet fuel gets more expensive than electrical grid power. But for now, America is uniquely hostile to passenger rail, and increasing high speed offerings isn't necessarily going to induce enough demand for these projects to become economically competitive with other forms of intercity transportation.

Dealers fucked Ford Corporate's EV strategy, by adding fees and slowing down sales on the EV versions, and using the wait-list to try to sell people on a truck today.

There have also been statements by Ford's CEO that there were design lessons learned from the F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach E about being more thoughtful and efficient with wiring and harnesses to save weight/material/cost with a dedicated EV platform rather than adding an EV powertrain to a vehicle designed for ICE powertrains.

The small truck they're going to release next year should show some of the lessons learned.

I don't know how much to attribute to the war in Iran. The Chinese government ended a tax rebate program for exported solar panels effective April 1, so all the producers rushed their capacity to get as many as they could out the door.

Now that production costs are 10-15% higher for panels exported in April than the panels exported in March, we'd want to see how April's numbers compare, once that data is published in about a month.

Exactly.

HERE'S A THEOREM: IF IT'S PROVEN, IT'S TRUE EVERYWHERE, FOREVER

But at the same time, even if it's true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

Isn't that also true of literal gasoline?

A 15-gallon tank of gasoline has about 1800 megajoules or 500 kWh stored, ready to combust when mixed with oxygen and heat.

You crash test the actual modules and make sure it doesn't short when encountering highway crash forces, same as you do for gasoline tanks.

It's for showing off the engineering. Lots of robotics competitions focus on different things (throwing balls, kicking soccer balls, moving fast), but BattleBots is definitely the one I'd be most worried about advancing a dangerous line of killer tech.

A humanoid bipedal foot race shows off balance, speed, power efficiency, and things like that.

This is actually one of the principles that is causing building codes to start accommodating load bearing timber in tall buildings. Even though wood is combustible, wood beams that are thick enough can withstand fire for long periods of time. They're still working out what the different tests and standards should be, but some jurisdictions have approved timber skyscrapers.