ppf

You do yourself, and intellectual curiosity, a great dis-service when you paint with strokes that broad.

www.googlehaswon.com/buyadumbphone

I agree with you. It would seem that the response to Covid has rapidly accelerated all that was going wrong with society, while largely halting all that was going well.

> A pandemic of toxic individualism

Given the social constraints that the various lockdown measures imposed on us, I would argue that you are correct, but not for the reason you think. The response to the pandemic has, in a toxic and damaging way, turned us into atomised and isolated individuals.

Those demanding freedoms back, are actually requesting that we return to an integrated, social society.

It's incredibly disappointing to see MIT put its name to some apparently PhD-level research that claims over-unity efficiency, and apparently (according to the picture) using a few baking trays and tinfoil.

It also does not explain how to deal with the increased salination of the water source, nor how water can continue to condense on the successive layers of the device as they are heated due to that condensation.

For that to work, each successive layer will need to remain cool enough for water to condense on it.

It's a struggle, looking for long-leg trousers in the UK. Next also has them, and their one-from-cheapest range is good enough for me.

For healthy people, Covid is not so bad. The data has shown this since early 2020, but try telling that to anyone.

I am so glad I got out of the whole game, and stopped using a smartphone. I'm also glad I live in a country where it is somewhat viable, although in our post-Covid world, everywhere seems to need a crappy app to get anything done.

So it turns out the original "disruptors", using scorched-earth business techniques, and despite adhering to the mantras of open-source software, have become uncontrollable monsters?

It should make you think a little about how things are done in Silicon Valley.

They share at least one property - you go broke slowly, then very quickly.

If it really were about shifting energy usage from fossil fuels to a "renewable" power grid, there would be an equal enthsiasm for electrifying all home and hot water heating.

There isn't, for two main reasons:

1. Making resistive elements in a box will not enrich any mineral companies, perputrate planned obselecence, nor maintain R+D departments.

2. It would be very easy and cheap to do, and when the resulting droves of people convert to electric heating, it would very quickly become apparent that our grid just cannot handle the extra load.

My "best argument" is that driving less, maybe combined with switching to a more efficient / smaller ICE car, could do as much good as buying an EV. It also avoids all of the new environmental issues caused by the materials required to manufacture an EV, as well as the financial cost.

>Greening up the energy sources for vehicle production should just be next on the agenda!

That would be great, but the article we are discussing has already strongly stated that we need to focus on what we are doing, not on other countries. This is despite the fact that we are effectively mandating the offloading of CO2 emissions to whichever country is manufacturing the major components of our EVs. The battery pack dominates those, in terms of manufacturing energy and resources, however all the fancy electronic toys and touchscreens that all EVs have also have a non-trivial manufacturing cost. My go-to example is that a laptop, comprised of an LCD, a few PCBs and modern microchips, and battery, takes about 1,700 kWh to manufacture. That's enough to drive an EV over 5000 miles. Start adding up all of those screens, CPUs, memory, and other semiconductors present in an EV, and that manufacturing cost starts to look pretty big, too.

Personally, it's clear to me that one of our biggest issues is the embodied energy, and attendant CO2 emissions, of all the consumer electronic goods we are importing at an incredible rate. It's a ludicrous situation when manufacture in Western countries has been tied down by emissions regulations, but there is no control at all on the products we then import.

As you ignored my comment on our other discussion, and continue the conversation here - I also assume you have electric heating and hot water at your house. After all, everyone needs to do everything possible to reduce fossil fuel usage, right?

Yes, modern engines are optimised for fuel and emissions efficiency to within an inch of their lives. This was my entire point - we could move a couple of people in a Fiat 500 and get 43mpg, in 1957. Without the incentives I mentioned in my first post, we could easily make an engine much more efficient than that, and fixable.