Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.
Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.
They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.
Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.
I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.
I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.
Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example,
[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.
> Repeated baking shows a steady decline in migration and emissions, suggesting depletion of siloxanes in the products over time.
I wonder what the fall-off curve looks like for siloxane transfer out of the bakeware. If e.g. 70% of it comes out in the first 15 baking cycles, there could be a reasonable path to massively reducing exposure from this source. Just cook a few sacrificial recipes on new bakeware and throw them out uneaten.
it's also important to know your audience. If they've spent their career reading technical papers or dense prose, that's one thing.
If they've largely grown up in the social media era and click away from reels/shorts that don't have animated captions, you'd design a very different deck.
I've been using the Viture XR Pro glasses and they're fine for occasional PC use but I don't like them enough to use a daily driver for work.
It's great for gaming and movies as you say, and also for adopting a better posture when using a laptop in a cramped space like a train or airline seat. But even with the individual focus wheels for each eye, it doesn't feel sharp enough at 1080p to replace a 24" or 27" screen on a standard desk layout.
If I had the option of one 24" 1080p monitor on my desk or XR glasses to use for 8-10 hours of thoughtful work, I would choose the monitor.
Regarding eye strain or fatigue, I don't notice any. The fact that the projected display appears to be 3-4m away probably helps a lot with that.
> The work may be niche, but the impact could be high. About 1 percent of SF6 leaks from electrical equipment. In 2018, that translated to 8,200 tonnes of SF6 emitted globally, accounting for about 1 percent of the global-warming value that year.
This figure is for the electricity sector only, not overall global emissions. Still, considering the sheer volume of CO2 puffing up from power stations, it's impressive that the normal operation of SF6 breakers accounts for an integer percentage of their GHG impact.
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Global emissions were 53 Gt CO2 equivalent in 2023 [0]. 38% of CO2 emissions are attributed to the electricity sector in 2023. [1] This figure seems to be strictly CO2, not including other GHG, and I can't quickly find a sector-by-sector breakdown for that year. Per IPCC reports in 2022, electricity production and heating accounted for 34% of global GHG in 2019 [2], so for back-of-the-envelope math, it's reasonable.
Per the article, the GHG impact of SF6 is 25k CO2, so 8.2k tons SF6 emitted annually is 205 million tons CO2e. This is 0.39% of 53 Gt CO2e (the global value), or nearly exactly 1% of the electricity sector's 38% share.
Thank you for doing these calculations! 0.39% of anthropogenic global warming is surprisingly large, but it doesn't sound like a big impact to me. I mean, it sounds like about the same greenhouse effect impact as the San Bernardino metropolitan area (5 million people) or the Chongqing metropolitan area (12 million people).
Retric: I regret not having responded in time to your comments, which I agree with.
In terms of impact, it doesn't sound major, I agree. But it's still work that will need to be done. As industry and transport become more electrified, and electric generation gets decarbonized, impacts like high-multiple GHG gases will become a bigger and bigger share of CO2e still happening.
Atmospheric CO2 is already too high to avert terrible long-term impacts of global climate change. Unless we manage to make massive cost reductions for atmospheric CO2 sequestration, weaning entirely off of fossil fuels will not be sufficient to avoid climate change impacts if we still add long-lived GHG molecules to the atmosphere. (SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime on the order of 1000s of years.)
Think of it like the tide going out in a rocky bay. As the water level recedes, rock pillars that used to be too deep underwater to worry about now are close enough to the surface to cause you trouble. On the other side of the same coin, putting in the work to clear them helps give you as big a space to operate in as you had before.
> Unless we manage to make massive cost reductions for atmospheric CO2 sequestration,
We will. The main reason atmospheric carbon capture is expensive is that it requires a lot of energy, and the cost of energy is falling through the floor because of cheap renewables. Expensive high-efficiency chemistries for carbon capture will cede to simpler, energy-hungrier chemistries, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum being something like soda lime. Soon enough synfuel from atmospheric carbon capture will be an attractive alternative to fossil fuels for transport (within 15 years), and then it's just a question of capturing the combustion products from the fuel. We may need to start adding high-multiple GHGs to the atmosphere to compensate for carbon dioxide we remove to make plastic. Hopefully shorter-half-life GHGs than sulfur hexafluoride, though.
The US has taken a very aggressive policy stance against renewables and in favor of fossil fuels, but ultimately it can't prevent the inevitable. If it continues to punish the importation of renewable energy equipment, US subjects will import cheap synfuel, or, failing that, they'll import electrolytic iron, zinc, or magnesium to use as fuel, from countries like Chile, China, and Dubai.
I am bullish on the rapid global uptake of low carbon electrical generation (global solar PV deployment alone is almost at 1 TW/year), but bearish on carbon sequestration being viable unless sucking the CO2 out of the ocean (due to energy required via atmospheric capture). It’s not just energy required, but how much carrier (whether that’s air or water) you need to process per unit of CO2 removed.
I'm skeptical of the Heimildin article, because it contains obvious factual errors:
> equivalent to almost four times Iceland's electricity production, which is about 20 terawatts per year.
You can't measure electricity production in terawatts per year; you can measure things like solar panel deployment speed in those units, as you correctly did.
This makes me wonder how many other factual errors I failed to spot in the article.
But, yes, we should not expect atmospheric carbon capture to be economically feasible yet, and when it is, we should expect most companies that attempt it to fail, just as most solar panel companies have failed. But remember that solar energy is free when the sun is up; there's no economic benefit to curtailing your electric production because your batteries are full. So we should expect vastly more energy-intensive approaches than Climeworks' to be viable.
Atmospheric carbon capture isn't an alternative to renewable energy. It's what you do in response to the much lower energy costs resulting from renewable energy, and to reverse the damage already done.
> Expensive high-efficiency chemistries for carbon capture will cede to simpler, energy-hungrier chemistries, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum being something like soda lime
I haven't looked into the topic much at all but that does resonate. It reminds of the way solar farms are becoming less fine-tuned (e.g., no sun-tracking tilt motors anymore) as panel costs drops through the floor.
If you skip forward to 16m 33s you'll be treated to a lively streak of invective from the passenger of a car whose driver has just confirmed that feeding EICAR to a parking system prevents it from letting any vehicle past the barrier.
The catch here is the cost of the buildings you'd need to destroy in order to build the surface portion of the windcatcher. The deep underground lines run under heavily populated areas of London.
To build enough windcatchers to move the needle on tunnel temps, you'd need to buy many plots in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Good share. fascinating rabbit hole to fall down. Interesting to read about other vessels which had been lost or abandoned in the same area and many months later washed up ashore rather than sinking.
I'd like to know more about the near-miss. Was it close to either port or was it during the open-ocean portion of the voyage?
The "Loose Ends" section of Teplow's write-up mentions that he didn't bring along a radar detector. Then or now, would a radar detector significantly increase a solo sailor's situational awareness?
It was with a freighter, China to Panama bound - no one on watch - about a quarter of the way across to Hawaii. My boat was so small it was mostly invisible to radar - I spotted it on the horizon, but it appeared to be on a parallel course so I wasn't too worried - I went back to sleep and was woken by engines. After crash gybing out of the way, I radioed the vessel many times, with no response. Out of paranoia I then did the rest of the leg with a strobe on - my next encounter was a vessel that had stopped because it thought I was in distress...
Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
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