Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."
I for one would pay for Arq on Linux as I now do on Mac. It would be fantastic to be able to use the same "it just works" backup solution on all my computers.
No. That stuff is sulfuric acid and it needs secondary containment during shipping, which the ordinary drain cleaners (usually diluted sodium hydroxide) generally do not.
This is correct. That stuff is also horrible for cast iron pipes which are code mandatory in many cities such as NYC. Doesn't stop stores from selling it or stupid people from using it in their cast iron pipes.
The manned space program launches from Florida but is controlled from Houston. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to have both in the same place?
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
"Transformers are necessary to make the AC system work."
This isn't quite wrong but the motivation is backwards: AC is necessary to make transformers work.
1. All grids need to move energy at high voltage and low current to minimize losses.
2. This requires a mechanism to step voltages up and down for transmission.
3. In 1890 the only such mechanism was the transformer.
4. Transformers only work on AC, not DC.
Hence our legacy grid is AC.
Nowadays we have an additional mechanism: Power electronics. Power electronics work on both AC and DC, so transformers with their huge requirements for copper and steel are no longer necessary.
We need to accelerate the transition of our grid to DC because DC grids are simpler and cheaper than AC grids.
Grid-scale power electronics are also extremely niche and expensive, perhaps moreso than transformers. HVDC is used where it has a significant advantage, but ease of conversion is not one of those.
> so transformers with their huge requirements for copper and steel are no longer necessary.
smelting some copper and steel and wounding it up is far, far, far, far cheaper than replacing it with power silicon(which might be smaller, but overall needs tons more of energy to produce)
It will be also less reliable. Transformers deal with any overload far better and routinely run for like 50+ years
Exactly. Your rocket can escape the earth at the speed of a slow elevator if you burn the engines continuously and you can carry an infinite amount of fuel and your fuel weighs nothing.
Since those constraints are impossible to meet in the real world, we have to get going fast enough to coast most of the trip on inertia after the fuel runs out.
I call this odious practice "profit maximization titration" and almost all companies do it now. They continually enshittify the product a little at a time until they notice a dip in profits and then they dial back the shittiness a bit. Or if they're really sophisticated they will enshittify the product by a large amount and then do a binary search to restore product functionality in logarithmically smaller steps until the balance between profits and customer dissatisfaction re-stabilizes. They 'git bisect' the product's shittiness, as it were.
There was a strong corporate cultural component to Fukushima as well. Tepco had spent decades telling the Japanese public that nuclear power was completely safe. A tall order in Japan obviously, but by and large it worked.
During the operation of Fukushima Daiichi, various studies had been done that recommended upgraded safety features like enlarging the seawall, moving the emergency generators above ground so they couldn't be flooded, etc.
In every case, management rejected the recommendations because:
1. They would cost money.
2. Upgrading safety would be tantamount to admitting the reactors were less than safe before, and we can't have that.
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