Bonam

Nuclear reactors are typically in the 200 MW - 2 GW range. And again, rectification off existing 480 V infrastructure means no need for big transformers. I agree that charging the battery at this rate causes major problems (heat among others) so that's why for now the problem remains with battery chemistry, rather than charging infrastructure. Once someone comes up with a commercially viable car battery that can be charged with 1-2 kA of current, someone will build the infrastructure to do so. Battery swaps are an interesting idea but I believe Tesla abandoned it for good reason. It's not like the battery is a single big cylindrical cell where you can just pop open a hatch, pop it out, and put in a new one. Rather, the battery is built into the structure and shape of the car so that it can optimize its weight distribution and handling. This is unavoidable since the battery comprises such a large portion of the overall mass of the car. Because every car will have different shaped batteries, you won't have a standard battery to swap. So swapping stations would need to stock hundreds of different models, which obviously isn't gonna happen.

For now, the real problem (from a technical standpoint, not an infrastructure standpoint) is that battery chemistry doesn't really allow charging at 1 MW, even if you can deliver the needed current. Heat is always a consideration in engineering designs but the cable diameter listed above is large enough that it shouldn't overheat. The cable could always be actively cooled if needed.

A 1 MW charger (to charge a 100 kWh Tesla battery in 6 minutes) at 500 V means 2 kA of current. 2 kA of current can safely be carried by 8 parallel 0000 AWG conductors. That's a 1.5 inch diameter (+insulation) charging cable, which is certainly on the big side but not totally unreasonable (a 2 m long cable with this much copper would weigh ~20 kg which is a bit unwieldy, so you might up the diameter a bit and use aluminum conductors instead of copper, which would drop the weight to probably 10kg for a 2m long cable). Upping the voltage a bit would drop the current and make the charging cable more reasonable, and car batteries could be stacked with more cells in series to work at higher voltage, probably up to 1 kV or so. Regardless, a solution can be developed where no megawatt-scale DC-DC converter is needed onboard the car. Realistically, I would predict that these charging systems will work off of rectified 480 VAC 3-phase power, so car batteries will have to work at that voltage (rectifying 3 phase 480V gives ~600 V I believe?). Using rectified 480 VAC power saves you having to have a big honking transformer at every gas/charging station and instead just a diode rectifier, which is much smaller and cheaper.

Germany is still with us, but not the German Empire. Turkey is with us, but not the Ottoman Empire. Austria and Hungary are both still with us too, but not their empire. What's so puzzling? The age of empires is over. Every Empire in the world fell apart in the 20th century, for many good reasons. These reasons include WWI and WWII, the rise of alternative forms of governments to monarchy (democracy, authoritarian states), nationalism, technology, education, and cultural change.

Given that opening sentence, you shouldn't find it strange. As you said, it's all about culture. And North American culture celebrates and exalts athletics and performing arts but degrades "nerds", distrusts scientists, and loathes the fact that technical people can get decent paying jobs.

In Canada, I'd say for the most part yes. As kimmy said, even the Harper government frequently stopped projects from going ahead when they were deemed too environmentally harmful. Here in the US under the new administration, it's probably gonna be a bit of a different story.

I have always been a supporter of managing the environment carefully and well.

The environment must be safeguarded but enough resources must be used to allow for a prospering economy, as well. In an area with as low a population density as BC (and Canada more generally), these two goals are not at all mutually exclusive. In fact, greater economic prosperity can allow for increased funding for environmental stewardship to actually reduce damage to the environment. For example, more funding for the provincial parks would allow improved trail maintenance and camp sites, which would reduce environmental damage. When it comes to pipelines, as far as I have seen, they are by far the safest and most economical way to transport oil and gas. Regulators should follow an incremental, iterative process to improve safety and reliability requirements over time. Reliability requirements should be tightened over time and for subsequent pipeline projects, which meshes well with companies also learning from prior projects and being able to construct future ones in a more cost effective and robust manner. In a place like BC, there really doesn't have to be some stark choice between a prosperous economy or a clean environment... we can most certainly have both, and for the most part already do. All it takes is good management and a limited rate of population growth.

Indeed. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. The 20th century was dominated by a battle between ideas as well. It was essentially classical liberalism against authoritarianism (which came in the flavors of communism and fascism). In the 21st century, communism and fascism are pretty much behind us (China isn't communist in any meaningful sense of the word any more). Also, classical liberalism has largely lost its conviction. So now in the world I see a few ideas shaping things: - religious resurgence / extremism: this applies to the rise of extremist/political Islam, as well as religious resurgence in America. - "leftism" as described in my post above: it's not the leftism of the 20th century, not communism or socialism though it takes some things from both. It's got elements of collectivism and racism too. But whatever we call it, it is an increasingly powerful ideological movement in Western countries especially among the younger generations and in urban centers. - classical liberalism: it largely won out over all competitors in the 20th century, but now seems to be running out of steam. In Western countries which are the home of this set of ideas, they now find few strong advocates anywhere on the political spectrum. Still, it for now has a lot of influence just by inertia and because a lot of institutions are built on it as a foundation. I'm probably missing a few more...

I think 10-20 years ago, if someone was accused of being racist by some mainstream media source, it was a big deal. Today, it's just shrugged off by many people as more alarmism, namecalling, bullshit, and fake news. Which is why the millions of times that Trump was called racist, sexist, bigoted, etc, didn't hurt his election. The left you talk about is spiraling deeper and deeper into its own vortex of ever more bizarre theories rooted in issues of group identity. The right of course has many other issues which I also deeply disagree with (science aversion, religiosity, security theatre, etc). 5 years ago if you asked me which side puts me off more in America, I would have said the right... the tendency towards theocracy in particular is especially offensive to me. But today, even with how horrible and essentially evil the Republican party is, I think the left puts me off more. The worst ideas of Republicans seem so obviously flawed that a mere moment of cooler heads prevailing would see such policies stopped or rolled back. On the other hand, the worst ideas from the left are part of a broad-based cultural outlook that inherently dis-empowers opponents, silences criticism, punishes non-conformity, and calls upon all of its followers to quash dissent and sees quashing dissent as a virtue. I don't know quite what the right "-ism" word is for where the left is going - this odd mixture of group identity politics, preference for groups rights and group justice over individual rights and individual justice, disagreement-silencing, embrace of emotion over objectivity, disregard for economic reality, and self-loathing of its own history and civilization. Whatever word history will come to use to describe this set of beliefs which are coalescing from the left wing into some kind of ideological movement in the early 21st century... I think it is as dangerous and inherently evil as communism or fascism were in the 20th century.

And very likely went to the natives and got them riled up about it, as well.

No, you really don't, unless you're in some highly public-facing career or expect to be so in the future. The people who would get offended are idiots who don't matter. They generally don't. It's mostly activists, who tend to be SJW white savior types who think they know what's best for everyone else. Sometimes they can rile up some protesters to make it seem like there's people that care. But normal people don't care about cultural appropriation, they have lives to live.

A typical documentary is a ~2 hour movie. During that 2 hour period, if I'm interested in a particular topic, I can learn far more about it by perusing a variety of articles from different sources. In 2 hours, I can understand the basic issues that are at play, get a feel for the biases of different groups regarding the topic, ascertain some of the important verifiable facts, and start to form my own opinion about it, rather than being spoon-fed something by an almost certainly biased video. Flipping through political documentaries is just entertainment, it won't leave you any more educated or knowledgeable. Many are blatant political propaganda put out by activists for one cause or another. It's fine, it's just no different than other genres of movies which are also intended primarily for entertainment.

It's very funny now, issues like regulatory reform of the financial industry seem so far beyond the types of topics that are now present in US federal politics. While the buffoon slings poo around the white house and distracts all attention, the financial industry can do whatever it wants. Perhaps that's the plan? We are after all in another massive bubble now... the stock market P/E ratio just reached levels previously seen only twice before in history: right before the 2001 crash and right before the 2008 crash.

First thing he did in Canada was pollute a river?

The problem with documentaries is anyone can make them and they can put whatever they want into them. I listened to this one for about 15-20 mins and then gave up after the author made some claims like the following: - Assad was a benevolent leader trying to bring peace and unity to the middle east before being betrayed by Kissinger regarding Palestinian peace talks, after which he was bent only on revenge (hint: no one gives a damn about the Palestinians, least of all Assad) - New York was "taken over" by the bankers after no one would buy NYC bonds anymore. I don't even know if this episode references real events or not, but if it does, it was always the city's choice to go deeper and deeper into debt, and they would have been contractually beholden to any bank requirements for only so long as they continued to be in debt. - In 1982, Israel wanted to "break the power of the Palestinians" and attacked them in Lebanon. First... what power was there to break? Second, the first Lebanon war was in response to PLO attacks against Israel. Anyway, I've pretty much given up on documentaries regarding any kind of controversial or political topics. It's all fake documentaries just like so much of the BS that passes for news now is fake. Documentaries about the natural world or science can be good though. Historical documentaries can be good too, although one has to watch out for lots of revisionism when it comes to any history in the last 2000 years or so.

Way past the point of "threaten to remove". After the referendum, Turkey is now a full-fledged dictatorship.

The weak will perish.

There will always be things to do. Humans won't be replaced by technology but will be augmented by it, increasing productivity. A factory might only need 1 guy instead of 100, and that guy will be programming robots instead of swinging a hammer. But there will be 100 factories where there used to only be 1 because we'll want 100x more stuff than we used to. The problem isn't that there won't be more demand for people to do work... but rather that the skills of the existing population won't match the demands of the new kinds of jobs that will exist. Hammers swingers don't necessarily have the skills to program robots nor can they necessarily gain such skills if they are already most of the way through their careers.

Good luck reasoning with protesters.

You would, until you realized that letting your drug be used in executions results in protesters outside your company's offices heckling your employees and calling them murderers. Then you'd reconsider very quickly.

A horrible motivation for "hurrying" along executions. Execution is irreversible and so the full legal process needs to be carried out to the last degree, no appeal left untried and no stone left unturned, before execution is carried out.

Hardly. If you sell a drug used for other purposes, would you want it known that it is also used for executions? Do you even want your company's name associated with drugs used for execution? Lot's of people may be put off by that and it can cast your company in a bad light.

I dislike religion. All religion, Christianity most certainly included. I would be happiest if no one believed in all these dumbass fairy tales that have caused so much harm throughout human history. That said, I don't support violent or discriminatory solutions towards that end, what I hope for is that religious idiocy will slowly wither away. In Western countries we've done pretty well with reducing the role of religion to a mostly voluntary one, people can associate with religious institutions if they want, or they can not give a damn about religion if they want. That separation took hundreds of years to become an accepted part of the culture, and is still not fully accepted in some places, US "bible belt" states for example. Today, we are bringing in vast numbers of people from places where that kind of separation is not the norm and not part of the culture. They come from places where religion is essentially compulsory, and where irreverence to religion is met with outrage and, often, serious punishment. If we stopped bringing more of them in now, I expect that over the next several generations, their children would slowly adopt the voluntary mindset towards religion that most Canadians hold. However, at present rates of immigration, it is entirely unclear if that will happen, or if instead Canadian culture will shift to more closely resemble that of these origin countries. I want the fragile progress that Western civilization has made to draw the line against religious tyranny to be preserved and strengthened, not to be sacrificed for the sake of political correctness or dubious and unproven economic benefits.

Presumably because they are already here. Just like Muslims who are already here are also free to believe whatever they want. But it doesn't mean we want to bring in lots more of either.