But the finance people don't want THE game. They want A game that is ready to release that fits into their quarterly financial statements. Predictable cash flow has a lot of value. It's not just about knocking every opportunity out of the park.
Companies absolutely DO NOT want TWO games ready to release at the same time because the marketing attempts will cannibalize each other. So, when one game takes longer to develop than expected, and a release slot opens up, another game must fill that slot, even at the cost of quality, because releasing multiple games at the same time is untenable.
By simple thermodynamics we can be 100%, not 99%, 100% sure, that the energetic cost of removing CO2 from the freaking atmosphere is higher than the benefit of putting it there in the first place.
If you want the process to be sustainable then it has to be reversible. Burning 1000W worth of fuel only to spend >1000W of electricity to remove it from the atmosphere and turn it back into fuel is clearly a net cost compared to just using 1000W of electricity to cook your food. Or less than that with non-inductive methods, since electric heat pumps can produce more than 1000W of heat from 1000W of electricity by removing some of it from the environment.
A non-sustainable process that converts fuel to CO2 and then into a solid or liquid that isn't fuel could theoretically have positive efficiency, but it is by no means guaranteed to (especially when the competition is heat pumps), even if it did by a small margin it could still cost significantly more, and it implies that you're eventually going to both run out of fuel and convert it all into an enormous amount of industrial waste.
That's very different from benefit. Also I don't see how that's related to what your original comment was arguing for (cost of replacing stoves).
Maybe I should add that I do agree with your conclusion (that replacing the stoves makes sense). I just disagree with the argument from "basic thermodynamics" which gives you "100% confidence".
Oxidizing carbon fuels is a irreversible process, meaning an increase in entropy. Dispersion of CO2 in the atmosphere also increases entropy.
We will always, 100% of the times, expend more energy to reverse a irreversible process than we could possible extract from this irreversible process.
This statement is valid regardless of the path chosen.
Which naturally spawns the argument 'let's not reverse it, let's do CH to CO to Cx, all we have to do is find x'.
The problem is this is not valid because we burn a lot of fuel.
Even if we found x, it would not be enough to sustain our rate of carbon emissions. In 2022 the world consumed 5.8*10^12 liters of crude oil.
So it would be necessary to include y. And z. Etc until n.
Inevitably including a regeneration step Cn + H to CH + n.
Now the path looks like:
CH -> CO -> Cx -> Cy -> (...) -> Cn -> CH
Which is a closed loop, meaning net power loss. With 100% confidence.
Maybe the one who oxidizes CH pays the bill to remove the CO2 emitted. Is it even possible to put such measure worldwide? Logistics would suddenly be prohibitively expensive for all but the most valuable products per weight/volume. Globalization is addicted to fossil fuels.
Well, that is literally all we did and build and invest in the last century or so. The very power grid of the world is based on carbon fuels. We can't run our carbon removal machinery on dirty power or we would be emitting more than we could possible remove.
It becomes 100% clear the winning strategy is not removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is replacing all machines and appliances that burn carbon. Worldwide.
Again, I agree with your claims about entropy. I also agree with the claim that replacing stoves is generally good.
One still does not imply the other. The question was about what makes sense. That's economically, socially, politically, regionally, etc. Amount of energy extracted via some processes is not the same as benefit. However, benefit is what matters. I guess this discussion isn't moving forward from here.
Yeah, the missing key is seeing power and energy as money, because that's essentially how our economy works.
We can convert one in the other, at different conversion rates granted, but still.
Energy input cost is a line in every company spreadsheet, it can block or allow companies to succeed. Today this line is kept artificially low because we base our economies on a very exothermic open loop CH to CO. Closing this loop is not an option because basic thermodynamics, which is the very logic behind carbon removal.
We have to stop entering this path as much as possible.
If using Fe why not iron batteries? Keep the redox, remove the energy from the system via eletrical current instead of low efficiency heat, boiler and steam engine combo.
Great point. Fe batteries are very new so I'm not aware of the cost/benefit or if Fe batteries still slowly discharge over time, but yeah in both cases you're just oxidizing iron, so why not take the more direct route to generate electrical current directly.
Iron is abundant on Earth, including within the crust, where it's the fourth most abundant element (after Oxygen, silicon, and aluminium), roughly 5% by mass. And yes, considerably more prevalent in the core. Iron and oxygen account for roughly 32% of Earth's total mass, each, the largest proportion of any element.
There's even a fair bit of it flowing though your veins and arteries right now.
And yes, the major ore deposits are old. Most are BIFs (banded iron formations), and date to 1 bya or 3.5 bya, laid down by early oceanic algae for the most part.
Sometimes it's more than fine to allow a slight exaggeration to pass without litigating it to death.
Let's be reasonable here, mantle and nucleus iron don't matter to this analysis.
Crust iron is all oxide. Fe at 5% average. In some locations obviously more concentrated up to 90% ore. Not all sites are viable for mining, and this is very important to understand. Just because there is plenty of iron out there doesn't mean all of it is commercial grade.
This means energy input to turn iron oxide into iron, which the article claims could be used as fuel and/or long term energy storage.
-Fuel I don't believe for a second.
-Energy storage it's a maybe. It needs to commercially beat plenty of options. Which to me seems unlikely since the path still includes heat and steam engine which would incurr at a cicle loss of at least 50%. And this being conservative etc. Would mean a steam engine operated in a very narrow power band - which would mean a baselevel powerplant not a peaker powerplant. And didn't yet consider other possible losses, as for one, the Fe degradation over time. Energy cycles that count on heat and engine are wasteful. Could this waste be compensated by a much cheaper capex and/or opex relative to Li or similar batteries? That's a big Maybe.
I myself want to believe there is a solution to renewables intermittency. But on this one in particular, I'm quite bearish for the reasons above.
The proposal is clearly for energy storage, not as a primary energy source.
To that extent, it resembles other synfuel concepts. The principle difference being that iron-as-energy-storage entails reduction rather than synthesis, in the chemical sense, for hydrocarbon synfuels.
There's a lot to be said for options which provide long-term, "shelf-stable", environmentally-benign, high-volume energy storage with convenient storage, handling, and utilisation characteristics. I've looked with interest on petroleum-analogue hydrocarbon synthesis (Fisher-Tropf) and alcohol (Sabattier) processes for some years. Both have long (multi-decadal, approaching a century) of established use. Yes, the overall process is lossy (as little as 15% net energy recovery), but there are applications for which there are very few alternatives: powered heavier-than-air flight, marine transport, mobile use, off-grid primary or back-up power systems, heating, and industrial applications.
I think I'd made abundantly clear that the abundance question is pedantry.
The challenge of using synthesized chemicals for energy storage exists for quite some time indeed. For aviation and marine there may be no other option outside of synthetic fuels, I agree.
Can this scale up? Or is this a small scale only solution?
Transportation. How much energy would a truck be able to move? How does it compare to a tank truck? Weight is absolutely relevant here.
Also, production. Consider that reducing iron is measured by millions of tons per year per plant, and right now, it's done burning it with plain old coal.
Seems very odd to me the subtitle of the news is 'carbon free fuel'. That alone is a massive bullshit indicator, but I digress.
How something that may have a 10% global energy recovery efficiency could beat a pure redox power storage solution? This question has been avoided so far.
Germany and South Africa have both operated coal-to-liquids (Fisher-Tropsch) at industrial scale. Germany during WWII, South Africa from the 1940s or 1950s onwards (I'm not certain if it's still in process). Both nations had ample coal reserves but little petroleum.
I became aware of the prospect of synthesis from captured CO2 + hydrogen (from electrolysis) from a US Naval Research Lab study around 2015. Those papers had ... misleadingly-truncated citations, dating back only to the 1990s. It turns out that hydrocarbon synfuels were first proposed in the 1960s, by M. King Hubbert and studied at Brookhaven National Labs and M.I.T.
Google had an X Project devoted to the idea as well, though ran into insurmountable cost barriers.
Scaling seems to be a major concern, though the process does work at experimental scales, and produces usable fuel. It seems worth continued research based on the potential advantages, even if costs remain higher than fossil fuels. (The USNRL research suggested "competitive" costs, particularly for in situ military fuel generation, notably in aircraft carrier task groups which have ample supplies of nuclear energy, but need fuel for aircraft.)
Battery storage has numerous limitations: low energy density by both volume and weight, and the fact that whilst fuel burns off during flight (and accounts for 50% or more of take-off weight), batteries don't. In the case of metal-air batteries (iron and aluminium have both been proposed), as the redox reaction progresses, the battery gains mass as oxygen from the atmosphere is bonded to it. This poses problems for flight, and even ground-based transport tends not to work well with batteries at large scale.
To illustrate the problem of accelerating any relevant piece of mass at relativistic speeds, observe how the kinetic energy increases towards infinity as the object approaches the light speed:
This means it's required infinite energy to reach c speed for any mass.
And c speed is quite slow for space travel.
Just for the fun of it, let's imagine humanity has assembled, in space, an aircraft-carrier sized vessel, fully equipped to function and nurture the little humans living inside of it.
Weight: 100 ktons.
Power is infinite ok, because badly rewarded nerds discovered new physics. Good for them they are now immortals of human history.
With Lorentz kinetic energy equation, one can estimate the kinect energy this vessel would have while traveling at say, 1% of the speed of light.
Energy: 4.5*10^20 J.
This is about two thirds of the total energy Earth receives from the sun in one hour. Or close enough to the energy the world consumed in 2017.
Now we have humans inside a vessel hurdling through space at 0.01 c, in addition to the pre-existing humans in a planet swirling through space. But there is a problem! It would take 424 years to reach the nearest star system. So we need to go faster and maybe break things. Hopefully not the hull, though.
F*** it let's go 0.5 c and reach Andromeda in about 9 years - long enough to write a book.
Energy: 1.4*10^24 J.
That's 3x the energy released by the Chicxulub meteor impact. Or 30+ times the 2003 world's total fossil fuel reserves.
Which raises the question what is the fuel being used?
Doesn't matter ok because new physics, we are transforming mass literally in energy no constraints 100% efficiency lol.
By e=mc^2 that fuel would weight - at least - 14.9 ktons.
There is margin for error, since the vessel would be shedding mass, and getting lighter. That would allow engineering to run the global process at 80% efficiency, which is a very realistic metric and maybe miss a turn or two on the way to the neighboring star.
BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of career civil servants hired rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. They answer to the government, not a political party.
The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term for the nine members of the BCB’s Board of Governors that does not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the dismissal of the Board’s members.
The personal information and the information related to the operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
All transactions take place through digitally signed messages that travel in encrypted form.
Ever notice how the US government was set up as a group of competing powers? Or how parliamentary systems have similar competition between parties, a senate, and the monarchy or wtvr? It’s almost like you can’t trust any one group with power no matter where they derive their power from.
I usually chalk that up to "if that happens I have bigger issues" because such a government could just seize my bank accounts and suddenly I have nothing.
I say that as someone whose government currently doesn't like them.
The big difference is that in a cashless society where everyone is on the same digital banking system, an abusive leader can delete large minorities of people from participation in the system with the stroke of a key. If they wanted to do that today, it would require a much larger commitment of resources that's going to be harder to justify and execute on, and more easily fought against.
Many of the arguments for privacy focused technologies is not that it should be impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt your life, but that it should be somewhat impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt millions of people's lives for the tiny cost of some compute cycles. The former is necessary for law enforcement. The latter is a recipe for genocide.
Also, thinking of it from a systems reliability perspective it’s a massive Single Point of Failure.
That system stops working (due to kleptocracy, or shitty rules, or a mistake) and literally the largest economy in the world grinds to a halt nearly instantly.
It would make the days of dealing with cash (which has it’s hassles) seem like Utopia.
I'm not familiar with Brazil's system, but moving a central bank to being democratically controlled is betterbthan leaving this in the hands of a private company. The US central bank isn't currently democratically controlled, but it could be. Then collectively we could decide how a Brazil type system should function. People are better served when their banks aren't run for-profit.
Until it’s politically uncool to be you, and the gov’t bans your ability to buy food. The Nazi’s got elected in their first time, democratically (ish).
If the nazis take power, and you happen to be one of their targets, having cash won't help much when your photo is being displayed everywhere with wording saying there's a bounty on your head as a dangerous terrorist.
But guess what makes it easier to identify and target individuals? Being able to do something like SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient like ‘synagogue’
All the transactions are controlled by multiple independent parties, whose interests do not align to do that as they’d lose their customers to their competitors when it came out what was happening.
Some of the data does go through central clearing at some step (ACH, Fedwire), but credit card charges, Zelle, cash, checks deposited at the same bank, etc. do not.
Since we are talking about nazis, it doesn’t really matter what is in the interest of independent banks and CC companies. The nazis will simply send the storm troopers to them and get the lists of people donating to synagogues, easy peasy.
With cash, you stay out of those databases in the first place.
Which takes time, so records can be disappeared. And since they don’t control the format of the records (yet) or what’s in the records (yet), they are also a ton of work to use.
Definitely not impossible, but much harder than if there was a single centralized system - dramatically harder.
Brother fckn nazis taking the government is a much bigger systemic problem that no financial system can protect against.
The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.
No, making it so you can’t buy anything without the gov’ts permission makes it not only more tempting for someone like Nazi’s to take over, but also much more effective for them to keep it and far more damaging when they’re in. Germany is a strongly ‘cash’ society partially because of this, but also because of what the Stasi did to East Germany.
You really don’t want the folks in power to have even more of that kind of power, no matter how convenient it is most of the time.
At least Visa/MasterCard, etc. mainly just care about making money. The gov’t doesn’t even have to care about that!
Using ‘we’re currently in a democracy’ to justify creating an even more tempting and likely to be abused tool of oppression is not a good idea.
A central payment system is absolutely not a tool of oppression. Case in point: don't like it? Don't use it. People are still free to not use it just like it even didn't exist. For everyone that chooses to, there is now an instant and free payment method. Where is the oppression?
In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoying a really nice service.
Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.
Look into the efforts of individuals within Nazi controlled territory during the war to save Jews and other persecuted people. When the SS comes knocking, if you’re a good person, you have a chance of “losing” some records before you hand them over. If it’s all in one government controlled database then there is no chance for individuals to work against the system. Hey, I think they even made some movies and books about this stuff.
Important comment: PIX is not a bank killer and isn't designed this way. Banks still exist in Brazil and they rake in pornographic profits just like everywhere else. The absolute majority of the banks profits here does not comes from payments processing fees. The fees exist to cover the transaction operating cost. Since for PIX there is a much much lower operating cost, it makes the service free for people and businesses! The ones losing here aren't banks, but credit cards companies.
Brazil Central Bank has a well paid and competent bureaucracy. The very successful PIX payment was its initiative, but the gov in power tried to pretend it was their.
BTW, Brazil Central Bank now is "independent", that is, their president was indicated by the looser candidate can do what he wants. In USA at least they respond to Congress.
3 million ops in 1 month, 30 days per month = 100,000 ops per 24 hours (on average) = 4166 ops per hour = 69.4 ops per minute = ~more than 1 op per second. I think we really should have such a system (Vietnam has something like this) but I wouldn't use it as an example just yet.
CBDC is being evaluated by pretty much every countries central bank. Governments are eager to roll out Central Bank Digital Currency as it will be the ultimate form of control on citizens.
CBDC will allow govts, at their discretion, connect your money to your ‘good citizen score’ (much like China’s Social Credit Score) and lock you out of society.
Short of launching all the nukes, it's actually really hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable than humanity's GHG emissions project. (3.68×10^13 kg of CO2 in 2022 alone! Impressive!)
If we could terraform planets as quickly as we're de-terraforming Earth, Mars would be prime real estate in no time. Alas.
It's way more dense[0] than air, though, so not a lot of it reaches the upper atmosphere. I don't think it's 22800x more effective when produced at ground level.
