More like a short hop from a bus stop to the station's entrance...but OK.

If I'm the artist, I wonder how many cutouts I have to make to be as efficient as possible, 6-10 frames? Seems like a lot of boards to waste (even if they're recycled).

It’s a ground effect hydrofoil sea plane inter island electric ferry concept, so it’s near its limit in the video.
Ground effect refers to a flight characteristic noticed at low altitudes where the air below the wing compresses between the wing and ground, creating enormous lift with smaller wings or winglets. This makes them much more efficient, especially at lower speeds or with heavy loads.
The largest I know of is the Ecronoplan- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan)

Here’s a bit more info
https://www.hawaiiseaglider.org/

Many “birds” make use of this flight characteristic to save battery power during long term surveillance flights, especially just offshore.

Nice dramatic music.

The thing was way too loud for recreational use. It also wasn't stable in wind and never had a safety system implemented so when there was a failure you just fell out of the sky from 100 feet up.

The 45 minute running time is very optimistic. The amount of thrust for fuel burned ( 0.683 lb/lbf/h) is not efficient. The engine also only provided 600lbs of thrust where the entire system weighed just over 400 lbs without fuel or a pilot.

No conspiracy, just not financially and technically useful enough to garner further development.

The Wikipedia article give a lot of good technical details, you can also look up the patent. A little data and common sense can easily overcome the drama created by overly dramatic music.

yeah, since efficiency is usually a measure of how much energy is lost to heat, should be 0% vs 100%... but, marketing.

I also doubt they are using aerogel or cryostats insulation to surround hot bricks. (or maybe that's why 1 container costs $9M?)

Matt (and team) from Undecided almost never approach their videos with a critical eye. Many startups' claims can be debunked with high school physics, but they just present everything as-is and with good production value. I consider their channel more entertainment than education, but still interesting to see some of the ideas out there.

Ok. I like the concept….thermal mass as short term heat storage/release is a well established science.

Sadly calling bullshit when they claim converting electricity to heat is 100% efficient. Nothing is 100% efficient.
They also claim 98% efficiency “pulling the heat back out”…unbelievably high.
Noticeably missing were heat loss rates, both for capture and storage over time…both expected to be extremely high at temperatures of 1500C.

The second system boasting 80% efficiency (but why burning wood?) is more realistic, but the only 3% heat loss per day at 500C temperatures claim is not. No insulation I’ve ever heard of is that efficient.

Recycling industrial manufacturing heat seems smart, but I think they need to be honest up front about the real world expectations and uses. If it could cut the energy needed to bake limestone or melt steel in half, that’s great…please don’t imply it could cut it by anything approaching 97%. That makes me not trust it at all.

1) 1:48 NASA nails asteroid

2) 3:03 US joins Kigali amendment

3) 4:05 purportedly extinct species make comeback

4) 5:11 malaria vaccine progresses through trials

5) 6:33 lyme disease vaccine nearing market return

6) 8:04 US soccer teams strike monumental deal

7) 8:58 free lunches programs expand

8 ) 10:04 Europe standardizing charging ports

9) 11:02 US ev tipping point hit this year

10) 12:13 plan created for plugging orphan wells

11) 13:28 Canada pilots prescriptions for outdoors time

12) 14:18 military suicides see decline

13) 15:26 HIV vaccines progressing through trials

14) 16:18 art museums solve funding issue

15) 17:08 battery swap technology spreading

16) 18:22 ethereum achieves major efficiency gain

17) 19:42 MLB figures out authentication

18) 20:54 Klamath river set for return

19) 22:03 Intel launches deepfake detector

20) 22:47 solution for removing pfa's found

21) 24:16 US States ban slavery

22) 25:42 nuclear fusion breakthrough

Professional economist here (hence, perceived as right wing) who began studying economics due to concern about climate change (hence, perceived as left wing).

[1] The classic statement of when markets 'work' is the 'first fundamental theorem of welfare economics'.

[2] 'work' in this sense means 'leads to a Pareto-optimal outcome', which means an outcome in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. This is a low standard: an outcome in which I have everything is Pareto-optimal.

[3] the conditions for the welfare theorems are generally not satisfied in practice. Here, as alluded to in the ad, carbon emissions are 'externalities': if an oil company sells you gas, which you then use, both of you are better off, because you're assumed to have taken into account the effects of your exchange, and decided to proceed; other parties have not, so may be worse off.

[4] in general, failure of the welfare theorem conditions isn't enough to make the case for government intervention: the outcome may still be 'constrained' efficient - meaning that, given the inherent constraints in the problem (e.g. asymmetric information), the market outcome is Pareto efficient.

[5] again, even if it is, you may not like the particular constrained efficient outcome the market yields (e.g. I get everything).

[6] in the case of externalities, the theory is pretty well established - if we want efficient outcomes, we need to align the private and social costs. There are two basic market-based tools for doing that: quantity tools (e.g. carbon permits) and price tools (e.g. carbon taxes). Which performs better depends on the sort of market imperfections.

[7] obviously, we will never have a perfect estimate of the efficient price or quantity of carbon to emit in a given year. Equally obviously, to me at least, this is a classic case of an externality with a well developed body of theory pointing in the direction of some level of controls.

[8] in my experience: people familiar with the economic theory tend not to be 'pro-market' or 'anti-market': they tend to want to understand how the market can be used to deliver societal objectives and, when it can't, how to correct its imperfections.

please. communist?

think about this: one of the cons of communism is if one person is getting all the benefits of working as not working - incentive is nixed.

w/all the mergers of segments of the business world - oil, media suppliers, etc - the effect mirrors communism. w/o serious competition, these companies have less incentive to improve products, increase efficiency, or reduce consumer costs.

to wit: most of the conservative policies are closer to communism than ideas like trust-busting, fair employee compensation, reasonable taxation for high earners, etc.

most of the 'progressive' ideas would spur capitalism, thus the blue is more about the green than the red is about keeping markets stable and healthy.

prefer the idea of regulated capitalism over death through fascism.

what led to '08?

anyway...if you're money is on Tesla*, good luck. good to see a body putting their money where their mouth is. and great to see you in favor of moving away from fossil fuels. investing in the future.

if we can get there.

FYI: interesting article about the marketing of tesla
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/tesla-masculinity-study?utm_source=digg
from the skinny on the CEO, it is an absolute match.


BTW: keeping up w/the Jan 6 spankings? hard to buy the love of a loon, versus the safety of a nation. shakes a person to the core. all those serene conservatives w/o one iota of spine. if this is your idea of quality leadership - no Tesla stock is gonna fill the void of losing a homeland


*what did E.M. do for Twitter? taught some folks the meaning of 'cozener'.

So if you synthesize your own through exposure to sunlight, you’re good? Or at least better off?
Is it possible that it’s not the delivery method, but the systems that use vitamin D being healthy beforehand vs being supplemented after the fact? Maybe it takes a while to get those systems healthy, and supplements don’t help with that.

Edit: Maybe, since the same receptors are used to metabolize vitamin D as to infect a cell with covid, those receptors being “full” might be what’s stopping infections, and dosing with vitamin D after infection doesn’t magically replace the Covid with vitamin D? Not really about vitamin D or why you need it, just about the mechanism the body uses to use the vitamin D? Biology is intricate, and why things work and how is not always clean and simple.

Melatonin? Then why aren’t people with more melatonin, people of color, nearly immune? Why are island nations like the Virgin Islands still having outbreaks today? Why were Southern states hit just as hard or harder than northern states? Many questions here.

His explanation seems to confirm this. If your cells produce vitamin D efficiently, they are less prone to infections, if you artificially add artificial vitamin D, it helps with the cellular functions, but the processes that should be producing it are still suppressed, possibly more because your body isn’t triggering them due to low vitamin D levels. It’s less about overall vitamin D levels than about having healthy systems that properly produce and utilize it….at least that’s my takeaway.

It’s not just about sunlight..it’s about diet, overall health, sleep, etc. biology is complex, and we always want a simple solution. There isn’t one most of the time, and our attempts to simplify only make things worse. Eat well, sleep well, get some sun, get some exercise, and you’ll be as safe as you can be naturally….then try supplements in addition, not instead.

I get plenty of sun, and my windows are from the 50’s. It definitely makes me feel better to get sun, but there’s a limit. Don’t just go sunbathe in Arizona, use your brain.

Both my reply & the video itself are both tongue-in-cheek. So who knows the "stop before the line" mistake is intentional by the narrator or not?

What you described is pretty much correct. Where I live (suburb of Toronto - Canada's largest city of ~6 million) I've only seen 2 aroundabout in my area, and they're in located in low traffic residential area and they're the tiniest of aroundabouts. But I love them, they're confusing to us North American, I guess, but they're quite efficient.

I’m thinking Mt Chimborazo in Ecuador…at over 20000 ft, it’s peak it the farthest from the center of the earth (while not being the highest above sea level thanks to the equatorial bulge).
Sure, it doesn’t remove air resistance or friction, but halving it, even cutting it by 1/3 is a massive leap in efficiency and negates much of the extreme engineering and materials needed to overcome the friction….plus, as you mentioned, there’s the rotational speed advantage from launching on the equator vs Florida.
Also, while extremely minor, there’s also a slight reduction in gravitational pull at those heights. A joule saved is a joule earned!

What does end of life mean? Are they not capable of producing electricity or something? It's like people who buy a new, more fuel efficient car thinking they're doing the envoronment a favor, but fail to realize that most of the environmental pollution from a car is from building it.

This response seems to have a few gaps in it, but here's what a company rep said:

"And then there's our apex seals, they're like our piston rings," he continues. "In the Wankel engine, they're inside the rotor, again. They move at a high speed, and bounce around, they're very hard to lubricate. In our case, they're stationary, they don't bounce around, and you can lubricate them directly from the housing.

"So we basically solved the key challenges the old rotaries had with combustion and with oiling. Those oiling challenges caused both durability issues and emissions problems. By making those components stationary, we solve the challenges of the old rotary. And we also upgraded its cycle to give it much higher efficiency."

https://newatlas.com/military/liquidpiston-rotary-x-engine-army-generator/

Measuring the efficiency of "investment" into social programs is.. debatable.

This was the best 20 minutes on national debt I can remember to have seen or heard or read.

National debt is one of the hardest (yet closest to the skin) things to explain to people who have a lay attitude to economics. Right up there with Annual percentage rate and secondary effects of raising minimum wage.