Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop.
But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).
But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.
First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.
They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.
How difficult would it be to add further anonymization? Let's say I want to prevent the bike shop from building a usage profile on the basis of the age check (e.g. because I'm buying booze). Would I just need to get more chains from Alice, or is there an easy way to integrate e.g. group signatures into the scheme?
No, using another ID has a much higher barrier: more likely to get caught (it's the same ID, after all - tokens might (or should) be better anonymized so services don't build user profiles just using the age tokens), more likely to get punished (there's a real name attached to it), more likely to lead to a video verification request to compare ID picture with actual face.
Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that
* exclusively quiz entire sentences
* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)
* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),
* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card
Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.
> Many of my colleagues cracked 100k€ this year without being AT and having crazy high position ratings.
And for each of those guys there's 2 people working for 48k and happy about it. They've been at the same shop for 15 years, in a team of the only 3 people doing software in the entire company. Probably somewhere a bit rural, and/or north of Frankfurt.
Yes, medicine pays better, median is around 100k but with significant back loading towards the second half of the career.
Finance can be (much) better, but feels like far fewer jobs, especially outside Frankfurt. I'm not sure finding a high paying finance jobs is easier than finding a software job at the German office of an American firm (which pay similarly well).
> I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.
It's important to look at comparable companies. If you're a SE at a company with many factory workers, firing the SE is usually equally as difficult as firing the factory worker. They usually have the same protections and are in the same union. Software shops just tend to be smaller and those have lower job security.
Even more interesting is if a thinking LLM would come up with tricks mitigating its own known limits - like listing animals in alphabetical order, or launching a shell/interpreter with a list that contains previous answers (which it then checks each new answer against).
> The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.
Sounds like you have a music discovery process in nicotine? Can you elaborate on how you find new things to listen to? Just my looking at what individual other users listen to?
Music discovery is the one thing I cannot drop Spotify for. I want to make a playlist with 10 songs and then have an algorithm suggest 20 more - ideally songs I have never listened to before, or songs I haven't listened to in a long time.
Spotify is mediocre at that task, but I just can't find a replacement at all...
Then, when downloading in nicotine, you can click a user to see all their shares, so I just scroll through what other kind of stuff they have, and download anything that strikes my fancy.
But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).
But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
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