The anti Palantir / anti AI / anti tech / anti billionaire sentiment is just way too strong. Far, far to many people post inflammatory things for the data collection to really matter.
Contrary to Karp’s fantasies, he will not have the capability to send fent-laced piss drones to every single person who’s ever criticized him.
In addition, the more data they have on us, the higher the odds they have something “bad”. So the irony of them increasing the volume of surveillance data is that it becomes pointless for people to “behave” in front of the camera once they’ve “crossed the line”.
Doesn't really matter if you talk shit online, it's just passive aggressive pressure relief. What matters is you not being able to effectively protest or do anything about it.
Well actually it does make a difference. Precrime only works if they can separate signal from noise. Much like how the more users there are on the Tor network, the easier it is to blend in, overriding the system with “threat signals” just adds noise to their predictive models.
And in addition to that, talking shit online lets others know they’re not alone. It increases the odds of coordinated action.
The best propaganda trick up the CIA etc.’s sleeve right now is the illusion of inevitability and learned helplessness. Online voicing of opinions is critical to fighting both of these tactics.
It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too.
I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change: food production, habitat restoration, etc. However, most of us are putting organics into refuse streams where they're likely to be burned or buried in a way that's actually harmful because they release methane when they decompose under those conditions. It can be a bit gross and tedious to compost at home but there is a certain satisfaction which comes along with it.
I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen.
Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water.
Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.
We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.
Yes, any landfill of any size is going to clean this up a bit and run it through a generator. They can get contracts from the utility to use so much power per week (whatever the tank capacity iso and since the utility controls when it is on (that is when other renewables are low) they get a higher price. The details are complex, but thus is very valuable green renewable (we can debate how green and renewable eslewhere) energy to a utility.
At some sites, the methane is burned in gas engine to generate electricity. Some sites build a CHP and resales the heat for district heating. The engines may need more maintenance due to silicate in the gas.
There used to be a huge flare at a landfill near here but at some point they redirected it to energy generation, around 200-250kWe from gas that was just going to waste before then.
The thought occurred to me some 25+ years ago that today's landfills will be tomorrow's mines. I hope it isn't true but taking the very long view I'm afraid it will be.
A british inventor created a setup with two long vibrating plates with ferrofluid in between. A flaky powder made from garbage was dumped in on one side and came out the other end beautifully separated in many layers by density. (with one mixed layers in between that went back in at the beginning) Innitially he "knew" it was silly to use something as expensive as ferrofluid but planned to try other substances if it worked. It turned out the process produced a lot more ferrofluid than it used.
We already mine landfills -- mostly for land reclamation but sometimes to recover resources.
In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.
Example: Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google HQ in Mountain View. Built on top of a landfill. For a while in the 80s, there were occasionally small fires during shows when people lit cigarettes. Google also harvested the methane and used it to power some stuff, although I can't find an authoritative article with details.
Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the fill underneath settles. There was one place where they'd paved over it rather than leaving it as soil to create tennis courts and after a few years it was a sort of dune landscape since they couldn't backfill the dips with soil. It was quite picturesque actually, a sort of post-apocalyptic look with miniature ponds with reeds growing in them and occasional visits from ducks. Sure, they'd lose a kid in one from time to time, but being a large school they didn't have a shortage of those.
when I first saw it in the 1990s it was kinda on the outs, like K-Mart was already failing (as a business) and the parking lot was visibly wavy because of subsidence. Funny the New York Pizzeria mentioned in that article is run by my relatives.
Indeed, sometimes big things. The landfill we used when I was growing up is now beneath a Home Depot, which was built over the top of it almost 25 years ago. The landfill in this case was unlined, too.
Yup. It is a little undesirable for various reasons, and not every landfill is suitable for construction on top (seismics, sealing/capping technique, materials, etc).
St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through
In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.
Well, a plasma torch -> energy system is basically a chemical factory attached to a plasma torch and the thing about a chemical factory is that quality inputs lead to quality outputs. Poor quality inputs lead to poor quality outputs or maybe something blowing up. Any kind of "circular economy" chemical factory has the problem that it has to run on whatever inputs are available that day and that kind of thing will have Chem-E's pulling their hair out.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
For those who can't or find dealing with compost a challenge, there are also other options to recycle biowaste. It's a bit of pricey subscription, but we have a Mill which processes most food waste into chicken feed (you do have to mail the processed food to them for further processing).
Please elaborate. From what i know based on prior research, most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam.
How do you mandate composting in NYC ? Are you implying that all buildings have now must build a 3rd chute specifically for compost ? And who's picking up that compost ? NYC Trash collection ?
I've seen compost vending machines in my visits to NYC and a few other places, but i've yet anyone using them
I recently signed up for a membership (you can now supposedly cancel without making a phone call; WaPo has officially died in darkness) and this has been driving me mad, too.
If I'm paying for your service, you should not be degrading my experience using UX anti-patterns in any way, for any reason.
> SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no mailed tickets, will call, print at home, or mobile web)
Wow. I guess it's been a few years since I've used SeatGeek but this is news to me. Stuff like this and MSG's facial scanning regime (I'm sure the venues are all doing it to differing extents) make me not even want to bother with big concerts. Club shows are almost always a better time, anyways.
The article should have explored that aspect further but it's not all or nothing. For example, a geothermal setup could significantly offset the amount of energy required to heat a home.
> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
Also, yes, they are.
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