I don't even want to imagine 50 C. In sauna, it's dry and you manage 30 minutes by sweating. But living in a sauna sounds bloody awful.

Also, almost anyone with a med / bio background will say - emergency rooms will be full at 50 C, and morgues will be crowded a few days after the event. :(

I played the idea a few years back, at some anarchist-leaning not-just-music festival. We tried setting up a link over a 70 m hill, both stations using 433 MHz (500 mW transmit power, quarter wave antennas) narrowband (no frequency hopping) LoRa boards from Chengdu EByte. Stick antennas, not directional. Both stations were right below the hillside, so the hill formed a perfect obstacle between them.

Communicating over the hill in a single hop proved impossible. With a repeater at the hilltop, it was possible to make contact with the repeater from street level (no line of sight, trees obstructing), but the repeater (Meshtastic didn't exist back then, it was entirely homebrew) had software bugs, so - no link to the other hillside. :)

With better software and better planning, the experiment would have succeeded. :) And if we'd have tried building a link over a valley, it would have been considerably easier.

With ordinary WiFi and directional antennas (panel or ladder antennas), I've been able to establish links over 1 km. If one used a LoRa card, and had a directional antenna for the frequency involved, in clear line of sight, I believe 10 km would be attainable without being a radio specialist.

Depends on the person - I have seen households where a person uses less than 20 liters per day. :)

Besides, seawater can be used to wash oneself or flush a toilet - I think it's the use of drinking water that makes a difference.

But how much are "lifestyle consumption emissions" compared to total emissions? I have never seen the term before, so I cannot put it in context.

What I imagine:

• if a poor person heats 30 square meters, and a rich person heats 3000 square meters, that is a lifestyle-related emission, and will differ considerably
• if a poor person drives a car, but a rich person drives a luxury car, emissions will differ, but not considerably (the poor person's car is old, while the rich person's car has engine volume like a truck), but if the poor person has no car, emissions will differ considerably
• however, if the rich person takes a plane ride every week, and the poor person twice per year or once per decade, that will differ considerably
• both persons will need to eat, but if the rich person eats fancy food, maybe the transport, packaging and other factors add up to make a considerable difference? or maybe not...

...etc. A breakdown of how would be nice to see.

It is sad to hear that they voted this misfortune upon themselves. I hope it passes with a small amount of reversible damage. During a global economic crisis and time of change, I don't think this government can offer something to placate its voters, and they will get disillusioned.

Interesting article.

Regarding marriage: in my eyes, over here (Estonia) it's a formality, not a commitment. Most children are born to unmarried couples. Legal benefits are few. Marriage might be important if partners have different citizenship. The obligation and right to care for their children comes independently of marriage. The chance to set up shared property rights is not an exclusive feature of marriage - civil partnership gives the same possibility.

So I wouldn't focus on the formal, but the actual.

The actual seems to be that people seem to experience increased difficulty with finding relationships. Perhaps also maintaining them.

Part of this could be due to people having other priorities. When you have other priorities and searching for relationships would consume your limited reserves of time and patience, you save yourself from frustration and don't look.

Part of this could be due to women being more independent. When you are independent and stumble on a partner whom you get disillusioned with, you leave them and won't tolerate a frustrating relationship. The dynamic balance between people in relationships and people who are single might be shifted as a result of increased independence.

Part of this could be due to women and men being attracted to different world views, making them less compatible. Even being attracted to different hobbies, and having no common hobbies, can decrease the chances of finding someone. If society directs men and women to different trails in life, and these don't cross often, could it result in reduced chances of relationships?

Part of this could be due to dating on the Internet. Ways of finding and evaluating potential partners have shifted. The number of relationships starting in real life has probably decreased, and the number starting on dating apps has probably increased. It seems more convenient and safer like that... but everyone knows: on the Internet, you can leave false appearances easier. So perhaps people spend their time breaking through proverbial walls with their heads, because they aren't provided tools to find the right person. Dating apps, after all, are serving their shareholders first, and their goal is to earn money, not help people.

...but I'm not a sociologist, and not up-to-date on research. So the above are not facts, but wild guesses.

Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an “honest debate about the cost of net-zero” in 2020.

The Civitas report claims to offer a “realistic” £4.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says “the government need to be honest with the British people”.

This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of £1.4tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas’s “costs” and the CCC’s “net investments”. The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth £1.1tn, resulting in a net cost of £0.3tn.

In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially “catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences” of unmitigated climate change.

/.../

Unfortunately the report’s author has confused power capacity in megawatts (MW) with electricity generation in megawatt hours (MWh). As a result, he presents a distinctly unrealistic “£1.3m per MWh” figure for the cost for onshore wind power. The true number is around £50-70/MWh – more than 10,000 times lower. He then compounded his embarrassment by mixing up billions with trillions.

Truly classic. :) Cherry-pick a method that doesn't see many things, mess even that up twice, and get quite a bit of media coverage for the botchery, before it's called out.

The solution is obvious: wind energy can be collected outside a building, on an empty field, or at sea for maximum emptiness. Which is what people already do.

instead of having me listen to your gripes

Not my preferred way of dealing with criticism. You wrote a proposal (well, you let Chat write a proposal and presented it). I read it through, and considered if it was OK. I found parts that weren't and said so. If you don't want to listen to that, why did you post?

I am splitting a hair, but the goal is pointing out - Chat is nice at producing text and searching for information, but unreliable at actually evaluating if something would work. Unless you're extremely good at asking, it will spew proposals that won't work.

P.S.

As for non-rotating wind generators, yep, I've read about them. They aren't efficient. In the equations determining performance, there is a term named "swept area". For a non-rotating generator, swept area is the surface of its profile viewed from upwind/downwind. For a rotor, swept area is the surface of the circle reached by blades. The difference is huge.

The source is a scientific article from 2022...

"P. Bombelli et al. Powering a microprocessor by photosynthesis. Energy & Environmental Science, 2022."

...so there is zero chance of random folks using it practically, if the information was added to the state of the art during last year. The article even hasn't made it to Sci-Hub. It can be found here however. The journal currently wants to extort 42 pounds from the reader and I'm not from a research institution so I haven't got an account to read journals, so I shall remain in the dark. :( One could always request an author's copy from one of the authors (or maybe someone here is from a place which already has an account?)...

...until then, I will use a clue they have given: the chip was ARM Cortex M0. That is the tiniest of the tiny, the most energy efficient. Not much computing can be done with them, mostly just data acquisition (sensors). They require milliwatts or microwatts of power. The chip wasn't run continously, it slept for most of time.

The article's public abstract doesn't describe the growing protocol of the algae. Most likely, the same algae in the same container cannot be grown for a year. An ecosystem needs a biodegrader (bacteria that decompose dead algae) and efficiency likely won't be great when the primary producer and biodegrader form a mixed culture (instead of nice green algae there will be bacterial films and brown goo, limiting the sunlight available to algae). So the "cell" will probably need to be emptied, cleaned and refilled - but that's just a guess.

I would supprt pre-emptively defederating Facebook / Meta.

Directly relevant history: they allowed their users to talk to third-party XMPP servers as long as it suited their business. With size comes arrogance, so while doing that, they introduced compatibility issues which caused other people much avoidable work. Finally they blocked their users from interacting with third-party messenger apps.

Indirectly relevant history: Facebook has caused damage to society by allowing better manipulation (targeted advertising) and helped fuel conflict (preference for content that makes people click).

A company with their history and ownership model can be expected to behave selfishly to the detriment of others.

Batteries have a very important role in transitioning off fossil fuels.

They do not inherently lead to disaster, but to make the transition, lithium batteries in their current form are insufficient. Fortunately most people aren't intending to do stationary energy storage for the electric grid with lithium. For that, sulfur-aluminum or lead-antimony (liquid metal) batteries are better, alongside pumped hydro, thermal storage, liquefied air, power-to-gas, etc, etc.

As the number of battery-powered vehicles grows, recycling of lithium becomes important, and sodium ion batteries (already manufactured, but not en masse) will be needed because sodium is much more abundant.

The electric grid will have to adapt. On some days, vehicles might not draw power from the grid, but return it - to balance out a power plant that dropped offline, or help during peak demand.

Traveling less will help and optimizing life to be convenient with less travel will help - but I think one can safely discard the possibility that everything can be altered. Unless economic shortage prevents them, people will travel, but the environmental impact of this can be very different depending on how they do it. :)

So - it's a puzzle with many bottlenecks and many ways to circumvent them.