'Some versions of the tale differ from Goethe's, and in some versions the sorcerer is angry at the apprentice and in some even expels the apprentice for causing the mess. In other versions, the sorcerer is a bit amused at the apprentice and he simply chides his apprentice about the need to be able to properly control such magic once summoned.[] The sorcerer's anger with the apprentice, which appears in both the Greek Philopseudes and the Dukas score (and its film adaptation Fantasia), does not appear in Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling".'
Do you have any thoughts on Mozilla? It has a two-entity structure, but there are a lot of complaints that it is not sticking to its mission (or, slightly differently, that it's not succeeding at it, due to poor strategic choices).
(Apologies if you already addressed this somewhere. Thanks for doing this)
The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.
>>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach
However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves.
Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.
That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.
It’s hard to enforce a law so we should not have the law seems a poor argument.
Let’s say we define personal data about, generated by or inferred from the actions of a natural person as owned by the society as a whole. And misuse is liable to 5% of annual turnover. It’s more or less GDPR. That seems viable - and I am sure an army of class action lawyers will be happy to help out
(Ok I need to work on a better proposal but I think this is more doable than you are allowing for)
I don't think we necessarily disagree. I am pessimistic about laws being effective in this case, but that doesn't mean we should not try to find ones that are. I like your idea. Thinking and trials in that direction would be good.
Data using organisations often seem to prefer fig-leaf laws that aren't effective, and lobby against ones that might be effective. "My data use is a good use, therefore I should not be subject to restrictions and oversight". Instead, anyone with a use of data which is valuable to the public should not see themselves as on the same side as the advertisers and surveillance vendors. They should see themselves as on the opposite side.
Characterising people who analyse reprehensible material in order to try to save children from abuse as “pedos working for government to watch all the reported images” is, quite frankly, disgusting.
Depends how it works in the jurisdiction, but in common law usually this form of restriction is like a contract, but between two pieces of land, or between a piece of land and the public, rather than between two persons. In the former case only the current owner on the benefited property can complain. In the latter case, any member of the public can - but I'm not sure if a member of the public can create such a restriction.
Training and advice is about the expected disaster, not necessarily the one you are in.
In 9/11, lots of people escaped the south tower using elevators, which is the opposite of what you're told to do. There are people who died because they chose to follow the stair route. But others died because they were trapped in elevators.
I appreciate the sentiment, but this is exactly like the expectation that people can be responsible for intervening when self-driving or driver-assistance goes wrong. Human brains are strongly driven to conserve energy. If nothing seems to be happening - when errors become less and less frequent - the more difficult it becomes to guarantee intervention, and the less practiced the human will be at doing so.
I have written factory tests, in which I injected errors to make sure that the factory workers didn't develop "click next" syndrome and actually noticed errors. That's what you'd have to do. It's hard to get an organisation to stick to that, when they add up the time they're paying for in detecting fake errors.
Yeah, suppose a self-driving car is say twice as likely to crash as the average human (which could already be considered unfair since that includes like drunk humans and people who should've already lost their license). That means to monitor it's driving you will need to wait 25,000 hours until an accident occurs. That's ~ 12 straight years of a 9-5 spent sitting, doing absolutely nothing, just watching in a state of theoretical vigilance.
It used to be that VCs wanted founders to pursue a singleton strategy, because they wanted the diversification to occur at the level of their portfolio - on the grounds that at the level of an individual startup, diversification would less likely to succeed. The catchphrase was that they wanted "pure play" investments. So it would be interesting to know why it's now a cause of friction. (The "pure play" thing was actually from before YC took off and gave founders a bit more agency; and before the "pivot" was popularised; I get the impression that VCs back then were not too happy for a founder to change direction and confuse their portfolio)
There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could do by using the same surface area for solar panels, driving a conventional setup. My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain.
This paper is interesting, however, in directly producing crystalline salt, which is lower volume than brine and easier to dispose of, maybe even valuable.
I always thought that if separating water and salt were easy, our bodies would have evolved to do it so that we'd be able to drink sea water and be fine. It must have been so expensive that searching for fresh water was worth it or there were plenty of fresh water that it was never a evolutionary pressure. Evolving kidneys capable of concentrating urine beyond 3 something percent concentration (sea water) perhaps required a massive restructuring of our internal organs and a huge constant energy expenditure, so we kept seeking fresh water.
It’s mostly that it takes energy. If fresh water is we drink that. There aren’t a lot of places where only salt water is available so, for most animals, it isn’t worth it to have evolved a way to extract water from salt water.
Animals in the ocean of course do live without fresh water. Some of them just live off of water extracted directly from their food or from metabolizing that food, which produces water. Some animals have specialized cells that excrete salt so that can take in salt water and separate out the salt.
>I always thought that if separating water and salt were easy, our bodies would have evolved to do it so that we'd be able to drink sea water and be fine.
Unfortunately for terrestrial animals, it's just not that simple. Seawater contains a lot of microbial life, some of which can be infectious or toxic. Going to the coastline to drink is potentially hazardous, because it usually means descending a hill on a predictable route which will be attractive to predators. And you need to get pretty far into the water, usually, because of nasty stagnant runoff, which can come from decaying matter that washes ashore, and sand in the surf. That means you risk drowning. Plus, you don't just need the energy for desalination, but the infrastructure (similar problem to real life!), which means more and larger juxtamedullary nephrons in the kidney, which is already a major weak point on the back due to the high blood flow in the kidney. Meanwhile, most of your food contains a lot of water, especially if you're one of the 99.99999% of animal species that doesn't cook it.
Thermal methods require energy, it seems like this substrate is effective at maintaining its solar-thermal absorbing properties better than a material that will attract salts
> Testing their solar-thermal desalination technique using samples of water from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, Guo and his team were able to make the surface self-cleaning. In other words, it extracted freshwater and directed the remaining salts to the passive region where they could be later collected without reducing the panel’s efficiency.
This is not "large" this is a moderate improvement. Albedo is likely only marginally affected, and the solar power input over area is the same.
Depending on this cost of this process it could very likely be a wash in terms of NPV
MIT had a spin-out company some years ago doing HDH (Humidification-Dehumidification) desalination.
In thermal cycles, the problem has been in the condensation step. If there is a carrier gas present this inhibits heat/mass transfer at the condenser surfaces. The usual way of getting around this has been to operate the system with no carrier gas, but that requires pressures below atmospheric pressure, requiring strong walls to withstand external atmospheric pressure.
The MIT invention was a bubble tray contactor, where air is bubbled up through trays of progressively cooler water. The water/air bubble interface provides a large surface area at low cost. One of the markets for this was cleaning up brine from fracked wells.
The company, Gradiant, is still around but has evolved to involve a wider range of water treatment technologies (which is very sensible from a business viewpoint, as customers buy complete solutions, not individual technologies). https://www.gradiant.com/
If this can be applied to mine effluent, you could replace the maybe with most certainly. Sulfuric acid effluent lakes leech all sorts of valuable metals out of the ground.
Focusing on pure energy efficiency might be missing the point of economic efficiency.
An RO desalination plant needs electric energy to drive the pumps, which might be generated by panels which are 15-20% efficient. So, if you can have cheap thermal desalination panels, they come out ahead even if 6x less energy eficient, you avoid the whole expensive and fragile desalination plant and you gain a low skill, distributed setup.
This is valid for some use cases, but then it needs to be compared with other solar distillation methods, of which there are already a variety at different levels of energy efficiency, complexity, and land use.
> My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain.
RO is about 2-4x the theoretical minimum, depending on how much water you're willing to reject.
This is a weird angle I think? Desalination brine is a real problem, so if you can eliminate that then efficiency is less of an issue (especially given that desalination plants are often in places with a lot of sunlight!).
You don't want to be super duper inefficient but "no waste that has to be dumped back out" feels really big to me
If you use fat pipes that go a decent distance from shore, diluting your brine with ocean water, you’ll have a negligible impact on the ocean. The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it.
IMO this is an issue where NIMBYs are using environmental concerns as a smokescreen to block new desal plants from ruining the vibe at their beachfront property. Rhymes with the opposition against offshore wind farms.
The city of Corpus Christi, TX is currently considering options for desalination plants—all of which pump their brine into the shallow water inside the bay or the ship channel.
> The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it.
I think that problem was known (and discarded as not important) when the first serious water desalination plants were built.
I can probably be convinced pretty easily with some evidence of that, but you’ll never convince the contingent who is convinced it’ll kill sea life at any concentration or location, so, being able to shut them up by saying “we have no wastewater, we load rail cars with crunchy salt and use it for stuff” still has value.
The goalposts will just shift to attack that excess salt instead. It’s like all of the FUD about datacenter water usage while people shove almonds in their mouths.
Yeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.
That still doesn't make it a good comparison. The salt emitted by desalination plants is already in the sea now, it's not salt that went somewhere else.
That makes sense to me. At the same time I know the mediterranean sea is heating up more because it cannot move heat out quick enough. I dont know of any mediterranean air, so I believe more closed water zones would behave different than, lets say, the atlantic ocean.
> Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground
Uranium can also come from the ocean water (there is, apparently, quite a lot of it in there, relatively speaking). Japan experimented with the technology in the nineties, but it really was much cheaper to just mine it from the ground, so they abandoned it.
It's about 3 parts per billion. Uranium is about $85/pound, so you'd need to be able to completely process/extract about 40 million gallons of saltwater for $85 to break even. The real cost there is orders of magnitude higher. It's one reason the claim about the Earth having vast amounts of uranium is quite disingenuous. The amount of cost efficient accessible uranium is only enough to last ~1 century at current consumption rates. If nuclear energy scaled up significantly, we'd run out in a matter of decades if not less, or we send the price of uranium skyrocketing and the price arguments would need to be significantly adjusted.
You're wrong. Japan does do their own enrichment, 150k SWUs at Rokkasho with plans to bring that up to 500k SWUs a year soon. If they chose to make.bombs instead of fuel, they could make dozens a year.
That's the dormant plant. Rokkasho-mura plant is officially incomplete for decades, doing tests and upgrades without actual production.
If you think otherwise and you're not wrong, and I think you ARE not mistaken since this isn't the first time someone other than myself mentioned it here, that means they're making bombs because we in Japanese public aren't told about it. There has only been just some routine commentaries from local mayors at most.
You could just dilute it using fresh seawater, if you used enough and (maybe) spread it over a wider area. The amount of water people need for drinking is a relative drop in the ocean.
Globally about 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture so less than a third of it will come back around, if it's exclusively for residential/commercial use you might do better but overall not a strategy that balances out
That’s been a solved problem, engineering-wise, for a while.
The advanced treatment stages take care of it. Between UV, ozone, and nanofiltration, etc. we can remove the pharmaceuticals.
Actually the problem is the water comes out too pure out of a well designed water reuse system, to the point where the mineral content can be too low and you need to add some back in.
Cite for it being solved? All the articles I can find have it as ‘active and growing problem with some potential mitigations which are not universally applied’.
All the recycled water systems I’m aware of still have PCC issues and excess ion contamination problems too still.
Admittedly my knowledge was based on work I did in academia, and I now work in transportation, so I suppose it’s possible I’m in error, but I’d be surprised if much survives the RO stage, and isn’t eaten up by the oxidation stage. My understanding was that the water needs to actually get remineralized to protect the distribution system. And that it’s very devoid of pharmaceutical contaminants by that point. I was unaware of this being an issue in real world potable reuse systems. Though, I suppose different jurisdictions may have different standards. My state was pretty strict.
Someone tell me why this is stupid, which it probably is: Put the desalination plant on a tanker ship and let it do its duty out in the middle of the ocean, then cruise back to port and dispense the water.
It doesn't need to be crystalline salt. Just mix the brine with seawater at a really high ratio of sea water to brine then dump that out. 100:1 ratio should be fine I would guess. Quick search suggests seawater salinity variance is already like 10%-15% or so. Even better if you pipe it offshore where currents will take it and not somewhere that doesn't circulate.
It’s not going to be pure NaCl though; making Morton salt with it would make sense only if it wouldn’t cost more to process it (net of its resale value) than just disposing of it somewhere not particularly sensitive. I’d propose the Utah salt flats or indeed, kinda love the idea of just sticking them in a salt mine that is all tapped out. If it used to be chock full of salt it seems pretty environmentally fair to make it salty again.
The impurities are exactly what give sea salt from various regions their distinctive flavors and mineral profiles. The salt should be edible as long as it wasn't pulled from seriously polluted waters. It might even sell for a premium.
I wonder. It would have to dissolve, a big block of salt would take a while, kind of like the erosion of cliffs where the salt comes from in the first place. Eh, I guess you're right though, the fish wouldn't like that at all.
that's 200% bullshits. Countries that invested into desalination plants are known to create death zones right where brine is sent back - even if miles from the coast
Assuming my constants (35g/kg of salt in seawater, 650k tons of salt dumped by the state of ohio every year, 81 gallons per day of individual domestic water usage) are correct and my napkin math isn't completely buggered, and if we look at the salt as a primary product instead of just waste:
Ohio DOT's use of road salt would allow for fresh water to be provided for somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 people.
On one hand, that's nowhere near enough people; it's a small drop in a giant thirsty bucket of water consumption. So we'll still need salt mountains, salt re-distribution vessels, and/or other ways to deal with excess salt.
On the other hand, 160k is a lot of humans. So perhaps we should look into doing things like this anyway.
(But we probably won't. Ohio gets road salt primarily from a mine under Lake Erie that has a very conveniently-located terminus near downtown Cleveland. The mine directly loads trucks, freight trains, and ships...and it's near the point of use already. It's pretty efficient.)
Actually I have been thinking about this. Surprisingly straight and long cuts in rock formations might be a real thing to track. In at least some places at least some rock blasting is preferred to get aggregate for road foundations. And these tends to be rather straight and rather steep.
It’s about thermal storage, you don’t use table/sea salt for that, and you don’t need a lot of salt, because the salt is in a closed loop; it’s not being consumed.
If you read the article you sent me, you'll learn that, just as I said, you don't use sodium chloride, aka table salt, aka sea salt, for these purposes.
In an ideal world that crystalline salt by product could be used to offset any imported or mined salt, further reducing the environmental impact of those operations.
Oh no, the hassle of managing the raw input for several key industrial processes that is created for free as a side product of MAKING WATER DRINKABLE WITH FREE ENERGY FROM THE SUN is TOO MUCH OF A PROBLEM! Especially considering we could instead murder millions of fish - which we then can’t eat- in the process! This entire technology is doomed!
Come on guys please at least attempt to think what you’re about to type, please, I beg you.
So, we could just dump it on the salt flats in Utah? Plenty of places are already super salty, so nothing lives there (unless it’s able to handle that).
Brine might be bad to the place you dump into, but crystalline salt is even worse.
Overall though, it’s just such a tiny concern. Ocean is huge. If we kill everything in a 100 foot radius, that’s 0.0000000008% of the ocean being destroyed. Less than a drop in a bucket.
I think the GP's point is that accountability/responsibility isn't a substance, it doesn't have to be conserved like energy or momentum. I agree with them.
It would be perfectly valid for the law to be that individuals don't need to unpick the corporate web of relationships, but hold any of those who contributed (above some size threshold) culpable for the whole injury, and leave the corporates to arm wrestle about how culpability is assigned between them.
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