The other reading is that the company plans to shift to a no-growth one, since it starts to return 100's of Bs to the shareholders, essentially admitting they cannot invest them in the company itself.
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics.
Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open.
Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible.
That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy.
It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
Remarkable amounts of carbon are available in waste streams, even if you exclude from the count plastics and other petrochemicals. Paper, cardboard, wood, natural fibers, carbon in sewage and waste food, and especially farm waste (parts of plants not otherwise consumed). Some of the latter is needed for soil conditioning, but most of that is from decay of roots, not stuff left at the surface.
All this can be extended by addition of hydrogen. Naively, if you process a carbohydrate into hydrocarbons, about half the carbon is lost as CO2. Adding hydrogen allows the oxygen to be carried off as water rather than CO2 (or, the CO2 to be converted to hydrocarbons and water in a second step.) Hydrogen currently comes from natural gas but that will have to change anyway, with the hydrogen being produced by (for example) electrolysis of water.
I really respect the people who have the sanity and patience to start the development of a new editor.
People are sooo picky when it comes to editors. Guaranteed they will not be satisfied. Too fast? Then it is not doing a lot. Too many features? Well now it is too heavy. Does it use sane key bindings? FU we want vim shortcuts.
Anyway, congrats on the launch folks. Hope you keep delivering excellent software despite the noisy feedback.
Because you'd have to have engineered the whole thing for that purpose right from the get go. In theory you can run the generators in reverse and push water up the hill into the basin. In practice this may not work for a multitude of reasons (priming, encasement, rotation reversal, cavitation, impeller and impeller housing design).
Also missing in vast majority of the dams is a lower reservoir. Pumping up the water from a river/canal below the dam would result in a dry river bed just below the dam rather quickly
Spain does have few (probably 4 according to ESP Wikipedia) pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants. Supposedly these are being used nowadays to store excess of energy produced by fotovoltaic plants. No idea how fast these can switch from storing energy to producing it and if these were used to help during the blackout.
> No idea how fast these can switch from storing energy to producing it and if these were used to help during the blackout.
Typically ~10 seconds.
The bigger issue is if these have blackstart capability. (IE, if they can switch to generation when there is a blackout, or if they need power from the grid to start.)
I was told stock to employees are left aside shares, or they sell the stock the company owns if they already went public.
I'm not convinced what you believe is true. Dilution is possible undoubtedly, but perhaps if majority shareholders approve it. And even then, likely regulated by a suite or other constraints.
I really don’t understand how Intel has not completely dominated the computational GPU market.
Nvidia’s toolsets and APIs are under-documented, and the commercial-grade hardware itself is super unreliable.
Developers and operators just bear with the whole situation because there is no alternative. To the point that they are ready to jump to things like TPUs or other custom silicon.
Say what you will about Intel, but their documentation and the commercial-grade hardware were top-notch. I wish they find their footing and this time stay humble.
Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel.
Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it.
In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.
In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.
Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal?
That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.
Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.
Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?
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