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Modern fossil fuel burning electrical generation turbines are between 60 and 70 percent efficient. Natural gas (methane) can use a combined cycle that makes them the efficiency winners there. On the other hand an ICE vehicle is about 15 percent efficient. EVs are around 85 percent efficient...

Largely because of the simple fact that one huge fire (e.g. in a coal plant) is much more efficient than millions of tiny fires in engines all over the place, an EV even running off of fossil fuels is about twice as efficient end-to-end as a fossil burner. This is basic thermodynamics. Yes...

I can see your point, but... You are comparing the efficiency of a large motor vehicle that can carry four people and a bunch of stuff to the efficiency of a single e-bike. Which is not an apples to apples comparison. Arguably EVs are much more efficient than ones that burn stuff (best...

If he runs a dryer in his house from a 60A feed there is stuff you can buy on Amazon that solves his problem. Basically you make sure the EV can only charge when the dryer is not drying stuff so it doesn't require additional amps, it just shares amps with the dryer. But the key observation is...

Can you please explain your thesis? Because I personally draw a different conclusion.

Image transformers are pretrained on datasets with (at a minimum) millions of images, and in practice likely billions of images. That's what Google does with all of the images stored in (now-defunct) Picasa and stored on Google Drive. That's what Meta does with all of the images posted on...

That's a hard thing to measure precisely and an even more difficult thing to compare. Two thoughts, though: Just eyeballing vehicles at the grocery store and post office, I see about ten percent of them having either a rear rack or a tailgate pad. While not conclusive, you could easily argue...

I don't know. The nearest Wal-Mart and traffic lights from me are about fifty miles. We are far from "overpopulated" but are often "congested" on holiday weekends. But there are a lot of cyclists out here and for the population a lot of cycling infra and more is coming. And we have a small...

I learned a new word today. Always good to be learning. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro-masculinity :

Canary. Coal Mine. https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-shield-itself-controversial-data-center-bloomberg-2026-09-24/ I don't think Oracle has to worry. Larry Ellison has the MAGA political connections and for sure will get a nice bailout.

You are missing the point. Network latencies are on the order of tens of milliseconds. Compute latencies for AI inferences are seconds or tens of seconds, 100 to 1000 times larger. You can improve overall performance far more and far more cheaply by throwing more tensor cores at the AI than...

Where do you get that from? You're scaring me, dude. Network latencies for those kinds of things are tiny compared to compute latencies.

The thickness of the conductor is a function of how much current (amperage) you are carrying, not overall power. The wire in that conduit carries 8kw (400v x 20A) from my solar array. For reference the posts are 6x6s so that gives you an idea of how thick the wires are. The conduit running...

Except that you need to put up power lines and build substations with any kind of new electrical capacity, not just renewables.

When you think about it, most hydroelectric generation isn't "centrally located" either. What ignorant rot we have here.

Yes, the coal plants in Wyoming are so very close to urban centers. Actually renewables are an excellent fit for providing compute for AI training because the intermittency is easily worked around. Part of the training infra already uses an internal market to only purchase compute when it is...

Yes, please explain to us how electrons produced by solar and wind are heavier and apparently have woke cooties or something that makes them more expensive to transport than electrons from coal or natural gas. I'm listening. The freaking point of electricity is that it is easy to transport...

Best estimates are Iran is selling 300,000 to 500,000 barrels per day. Which is less than pre war but far from "trapped". At current prices that's enough money to build 1000+ Shaheed drones per day. Which is more than enough to continue the stalemate and probably enough to fully trash all of...

I guess Basic Economics is now twisted. If you pump fossils into your car, you are, one way or another, increasing demand for gasoline and all of the upstream products used to make it. Higher demand implies higher prices. Crude oil is an internationally traded commodity. So higher prices...

Aren't you effectively supporting the ayatollahs if you are driving a gas car? And if higher gas prices are "worth it" to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, one would think driving EVs and not buying gas at all would in theory be even better. But I guess I don't understand the "logic" here.