I guess it shows how out of touch (old) I am that it’s completely bewildering to me that there could be people who do not understand folders … on a computer. Phones, tablets, yeah, I get that, those actively make it harder and harder to access the folder structure. But computers?
To be less hypothetical and more scary: Think about all the ancient pathogens that are dormant in the permafrost. Those could become a real problem when it starts to thaw because of global warming.
…and with what devices? Currently, there’s 11 GW of Electrolysis capacity available worldwide, with about 400 GW potentially realised by 2030. That’s 0.07% now of the total production of 16 TW from fossils, increasing to a whopping 2.5% in 2030. And that does not take into account that energy markets will be competing with industry that uses hydrogen as a reduction agent (steel, for example) to replace fossils. It also does not take into account that hydrogen is not as easy to transport than other fossils.
Hydrogen might be the solution to the energy crisis, but for that we’d have to pick up our game immensely. Which will not happen if everyone thinks hydrogen is already freely and abundantly available.
!Remind me in 20 years
Nah, those regulations benefit the large scale operators, as the economy of scale distributes the cost of these things over a larger number of venues. Plus you know the right officials to rub elbows with so regulations go in your favour.
Burrito trucks in the Silicon Valley. The proper one’s, where the Mexican low wage workers go. I was on quite good terms with the Mexican custodian of the facility I worked at (in the heart of the valley), and he pointed me to some of the really good ones. Usually, the best bet is to find a construction zone, there’ll be a few trucks out, depending on the size. The trucks are plain white (no ads or decals or anything), no billboards etc. And they have one thing usually (with a tiny bit of variety). Burritos (choose between three meats, get patatas or not), Tamales (literally just the one kind), etc. And they were all buck cheap. IIRC the burritos were 5 bucks (that was 2010/11?), and it was an unspoken rule that you paid in exact change.
The one burrito truck had a short stint on my workplace’s campus, together with a Mongolian buffet truck (you went in the front, got stuff from the buffet, went out the back, weighed it, done) of similar shadiness, and they were a huge hit. The workplace soon however decided that those were not good enough (some regulations whatever), and over night they banned them but got in the colorfully painted ones with the punny names (“BBQeue - you get it? Because you stand in line for so long?”). Now you’d pay 15 bucks for half a sandwich and a cup of soup.
Hail corporate…
Not just the internet, consumer computing as a whole became a shitshow. You need accounts for everything, Microsoft pushes you hard to use their online service, the default becoming that you to log onto your own computer you need to go through their online Microsoft account, which is terribly unsafe (if your ms account gets hacked, the hacker had access to you system). After “software as a service” more or less has been normalised, I’m just waiting for hardware going down that path, too. I’d say it begins already that I had to create a NVIDIA account to actually update drivers. Soon, this account may not be free anymore.
To most issues like this there are workarounds, but sometimes you have to dig deep. So it’s either you need to spend time to make things work like you want, or accept all this crap. For me, this is fine, because I like the tinkering. But I am also *administrating" most of my elder family members’ computers, which is a nightmare because of that. “So I saved the document, where is it on my computer,?” - “If you used the default OneDrive crap, it just is not on your computer…”
There’s also fuel cells, where fuel is not burned to create steam to move something, but combined with oxygen in a different way (the end products still being the same) so the electrons shuttled around during this reaction can be utilised as electricity. Think of combustion as oxidation of your fuel, the oxidation meaning that you (among other things) move electrons from the fuel to oxygen. In combustion, unfortunately you can’t access the electrons directly, as they are always stuck in the chemical bonds of the molecules, that’s why we take the detour via heat/mechanical - the steam engine. The fuel cell now separates fuel and oxygen, and thus divides the combustion reaction into two parts that happen at opposite sides of the cell. Those sides are divided by a membrane that does not allow the electrons to transfer across, so they need to take a detour through an electric circuit, in which we can harvest them as electrical power.
I always found it really fascinating that fuel cells are the only other technology than solar where the electrons we use as electrical power are more or less directly generated as opposed to the detour via a generator. Unfortunately, fuel cells are still a very niche technique.