LOL, that was great!

I can’t wait for the AI tools to get good enough for me to make my dreams come true. At the moment, I could probably make a comic book of it though.

Reality is too absurd. You just can’t make satire of it when life is already satire of whatever delusional fantasies I have in my head.

I wonder if drug dealers also do this.

(Henry’s phone rings with a machine gun ringtone. He answers it on speakerphone without a second thought.)

• Yo, Peter! What’s up, man?
• Henry, we need to talk about the new shipment of snow.
• Yeah, what about it?
• Tom’s got a fresh batch. Just crossed the border this morning. But we need to be careful, last time it was cut with too much crap.
• Yeah, Tom is such a greedy bastard. What do you say we skip the payment part, and just paint the walls with his brains?
• I thought you would never ask. I’ll bring the shotgun. See you at the train station at 6.
• Cool see ya there. Bye.
• Bye.

(Henry looks at the bewildered people around him.)

• What are you all looking at?

That is a good point. If the landing gear gets stuck because there a mangled carcass in the mechanism, it’s going to spell bad news for everyone onboard.

These things happen from time to time. You must be extremely desperate or ignorant to try pulling off a stunt like that. These planes usually fly high enough for the air pressure to drop to lethal levels. If you somehow don’t suffocate, the freezing temperature will surely get you sooner or later. Either way, it’s pretty much a death sentence.

Don’t feed the trolls.

Tl;DR the poultry industry is bad

Source: an animal rights group called Animal Equality

Seriously though, there are lots of reasons why there’s so much death, but the reasons can be summarized like this: Manufacturing cheap food at an industrial scale results in many unethical choices.

Yes there are, but would it be possible to replace them with ML and get more accurate predictions?

Yeah, that’s pretty impressive. I wonder if you could apply the same philosophy in other areas too. Instead of training the model with data produced in a simulation, you could just feed it real world data instead. Like, if you gave a bunch of stress-strain data to a model, could you make better predictions about the behavior of physical structures, such as bridges and towers.

About 4 years ago, this video showed that a ML model can be used to cut costs on physics simulations. It’s about time we did that with weather too.

As a part of grid balancing, we are already doing that to some extent. For the most part, the idea is that you can increase or decrease the load if you see the frequency of the grid beginning to drift off target. These types of frequency containment reserves can usually react very quickly, which means that most industrial processes don’t qualify.

However, since the duck curve is fairly predictable, we could (and should) extend this idea to slower processes too, such as the ones you mentioned. I don’t know if that sort of power reserve is actually being implemented, but it certainly would make a lot of sense.

It’s just that most industries prefer to operate 24/7. Having your reverse osmosis, electorlysis, electrowinning, arc furnace etc. running only during sunny hours is nice for the employees but bad for business. The investors of such factories prefer to see profits sooner rather than later, and restricting operating hours isn’t helping.

Cheaper electricity would obviously result in lower operating expenses, so I can definitely see some potential in this idea. You would just need to find some environmentally minded investors. They would also need to tolerate the risk that comes with a fluctuating power supply, which could be a tall order.

If the fluctuations of the local energy market are dominated by solar power, that means more work during the day and none during the night. If there’s lots of wind in the mix too, that could mean lots of night shifts during windy seasons and none during others, which isn’t great for the employees.

Exactly. Grid energy storage doesn’t have to be light or small. It’s not going anywhere, and you can build such facilities in remote locations.

Who cares if it weighs as much as a factory and takes the same space. You could go with molten calcium, redox flow batteries or even wilder technologies.

Have you’ve ever felt bad for buying cheap electronics or plastic products, because they aren’t good for the environment or the people working at the factories? Well, this article gives you a digital version of the same feeling.

It is possible that new battery chemistries or compressed air storage may prove cheap enough to use for long term storage.

There are plenty of options to choose from, but only few are actually industrial grade at the moment. So many promising ones are still in pilot stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing which ones actually prove to be viable.

Traditional lithium based batteries clearly aren’t it, but LFP looks ok though.

How about investing in grid energy storage, to cope with intermittent production?

surprisedPikachu.png

LOL. That acronym. They brought this on themselves.

And why does the government need to have so many people inspecting industrial facilities? Can’t a single person handle the entire country? On second thought, that takes money, and the goal was to cut spending. Just have the companies send reports every 20 years and we’re all good. I’m sure they’ll do a great job with notifying the government if something violates regulations.

So, if you own a coal plant and the government is spending time and money on regulating your livelihood, then that would be an obvious thing to cut from the budget.

Tragedy or comedy? Why not both?