Yes. Hence my initial claim that apps are worthless, and shouldn’t be used if you can use a website instead. So the whole idea of Apple or Android being able to remove the “iceblock” app, shows that the app was ill-conceived to begin with. Or possibly it was even a honey-pot since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website.
Most apps are a packaged browser that makes proprietary API calls over https. However there is nothing proprietary or valuable in the app itself, except possibly some key material for authentication of the app with the back-end.
Then depending on the user making various requests a middle-ware program will interact with the backend database and retrieve the results back to the user. The database is the valuable part and other then the specific query the user is making, nothing else is can be retrieved by the user. Normally the middle ware isn’t even downloadable either.
A lot of websites have server side programs taht are never downloaded by the client. So there is a pretty big difference there. Basically if you want a subversive anti-government “app” you really want a website, not an app.
Apps are just browsers that can only visit one website. Who cares about them?
What we have isn’t close to enough for a single city, let alone the whole country!
It’s in every hydro dam that’s already built in between Arizona and New York. If we even do need more, there is plenty of land to use.
This is the key factor I’m talking about. There is not “plenty of land” for hydro storage, and flooding the amount of land required to provide grid level storage is an ecological disaster. Plus your analysis of mega-project like nuclear plants going over budget and over-time absolutely applies to any grid-level storage project you would need to go 100% solar/wind.
But just for fun, how much space would the grid level storage projects take up? I’ll let you use Hydro because it’s the best case scenario that exists today as far as energy density.
But beyond that what is your point, that humans shouldn’t build big projects, and any attempt to do so is “boneheaded?” Capitalism can’t build big projects I agree, but the problem isn’t the projects themselves it’s the profit-motive.
Do the math, how much grid-level storage do you need to power a city like chicago assuming zero baseload generation.
I can dismiss the the other solutions that are worse then pumped hydro because pumped hydro is actually the best case scenario for grid-level storage and it requires A LOT of space. Anything else, batteries, pneumatic mines etc etc are going to be worse in terms of space by orders of magnitude, not to mention the actual costs. Hand waving the need for grid-level storage by saying we would us hydro shows you don’t understand the scale of the problem.
That excerpt from that engineer is great, but WHERE IS THE STORAGE? Show it to me on a map. You can’t because it does not exist. New Nuclear plants are being built, finally, but there is a reason that no grid-level storage exists. It’s literally not possible today. There exists a pilot battery plant in Australia, and there exists a few megawatts of storage in Scotland, but these are few and far between and none of them are suitable for massive deployment.
You can use whatever moon-units you want. I prefer to use people-centric units.
Show it. Tell me where the grid-level storage exists for a city like Tokyo, or NYC, or Chicago, or Mexico City, or Paris, or London. Hell pick your own city, show me where it exists right now today.
I guess if you don’t understand units of water per area, then there is no reason to expect you to be able to do any kind of critical analysis about why “pumped hydro” is a problem.
The solution to nuclear waste is recycling it, which was something France has done quite successfully. The US can’t do it because of cold-war era treaties, but realistically it’s because Nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy in our society and obviously there are trillions of dollars in the fossil fuel status quo.
As an aside, the aftermath of Chernobyl shows exactly how eco-friendly massive radiation events are, Prypiat is a lush nature reserve now. Human activity is much worse for any given area then radiation is.
Non recycled radioactive waste could be incinerated like we do with Coal and no one seems to be upset about it. /s
Yes if you ignore all externalities the “economics” means that you can use Natural Gas “peaking” plants instead. But one of the main advantages of nuclear power is zero green-house gas emissions.
If fossil fuels were taxed appropriately, the economics of them wouldn’t be viable anymore. A modest tax of a $million USD per ton of CO2 would fix up that price discrepancy.
Yes mining still exists. Unlike how Solar Panels and Wind Turbines grow like plants and replenish year over year with no other industrial process required right?
But again, you don’t appreciate the energy density that is contained in a reactor fuel. The volume of material is minuscule compared to coal. While oil/gas are a lot better then coal energy density-wise, they have the significant downside of greenhouse gases and causing global warming.
Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?
The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is “legacy” power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don’t exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.
Again, i’m talking energy density. All those other wacky ideas aren’t viable at all. Yes I know that the hoover dam is for generation, but the idea of pumped reserve power is literally identical to hydroelectric generation. The only difference is we would have a man-made solar/wind powered pump fill the resevoir, instead a natural source of solar power fill the resevoir. Either way, it’s a huge amount of land use for it to be considered “green.”
Additionally I never claimed nuclear power should be used as a peak generation, it should 100% used for baseload replacing all of our fossil fuel generators, with huge taxes being applied to carbon generators.
As an aside:
A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
This idea is trash and as far as I can tell the hypothetical existence of this is an oil industry fud campaign. The only viable version of this is pumped hydro, which has the land use problem I’ve already described.
Yikes. If words have no meaning, then sure. But there is no world where radioactive elements that come from stars have anything to do with fossil fuels that come from decayed biomass.
Another myth is that hydroelectric is “green.” It’s absolutely not. The huge amount of land required to build something like the hoover dam or the three-gorges dam is massively destructive to the existing ecology. It’s often overlooked, but land use has to be part of any environmentally sound analysis.
I would say that while the Hoover Dam, or the Three-gorges dam by themselves are acceptable, they are wholly impossible solutions for grid level storage for the entire united states/China. How practical do you think it would be to build thousands of hoover dams?
Other options like kinetic batteries etc, all come down to energy density. The highest energy density options that humans can harness are nuclear Isotopes like Uranium 238, or Plutonium 239 (what powers the voyager probes) After that is lithium batteries at ~<1% density of a nuclear battery. Everything else is fractions of a percent as efficient. Sure there are some specific use cases where a huge fly-wheel makes sense to build (data centers for example) but those cases are highly specific, and cannot be scaled out to “grid-level.” The amount of resources required per kilowatt is way too high, and you’d be better off just building some more power-plants.
Alright you’ve convinced me. The ability to store video’s within the app (for a non-technical user) is probably worth having an app. Of course a website could and should have the ability for a user to upload a video independent of an app, but I acknowledge that there are indeed some additional benefits that can only be realized with an app.
Of course I’ve never liked the wall-garden app store paradigm to begin with, and obviously if that wasn’t the only source of apps, then my entire point is moot. If any user could download the app from the digital ocean hosted iceblock website, and install it before going on scouting missions, then the app would be much more valuable, and the service more robust.