perestroika

No experience on that front, sadly.

Compared to iron redox flow batteries, it has about 5 percentage points of more efficiency (75 vs. 70%), slightly better cell voltage (1.8 vs 1.2 V) and better energy density per electrode surface (0.2 W vs 0.05 W / cm2).

The "resetting" of cells seems like a nuisance however. Quoting Wikipedia:

Every 1–4 cycles the terminals must be shorted across a low-impedance shunt while running the electrolyte pump, to fully remove zinc from battery plates.[3]

It's probably doable, but not a particularly attractive technology when compared to alternatives.

The chart is true...

...but the way Hamas does things (currently to Israelis, unless they have already lost - but most of time to fellow Palestinians, particularly those who oppose how they rule Gaza) is brain-dead. They practise torture, extrajudicial imprisonment and executions without trial, not to mention mild stuff like suppressing freedom of press and public discourse.

Hamas is a political zombie whom nobody dares to approach or touch. To me it seems that they bring much avoidable misfortune to the people whom they rule. They got to power with a democratic mandate (Fatah was spectacularly corrupt), but there cannot be a democratic mandate for ignoring human rights or initiating avoidable war.

Starting war is especially irrational if the opponent is many time stronger and their counterstrike will bring great suffering to a densely inhabited urban area. Especially if deliberate war crimes are committed right from the first hour, to give the opponent every diplomatic advantage and moral excuse for striking back hard.

I don't know why they started this round of fighting. I only speculate that war builds cohesion, and maybe they felt they were losing cohesion and needed some blood spilled to regain it.

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.

Still building a DIY tractor / excavator - racing against time, as autumn is rainy here and you cannot weld water. I need it to improve the road to where I live.

It can already maneuver, turn and raise the boom, lower / pull the bucketed arm (stick), but the excavator bucket is incomplete and the bucket tilting mechanism missing.

The remote control system is also missing (relays on a slow boat from China), so currently I have to control it via cables. Limit switches are missing, currently it's unsafe to use for a careless operator. Later on, it will be remote controlled and limit switches will ensure it cannot break itself.

My own reason to choose remote control is convenience (better ergonomics as I can write pre-programmed movements and stay out of noise). If it works too well, I might send a recipe to a friend in Ukraine, with the suggestion of asking around - maybe someone needs cheaper mine disposal machines.

Hydraulic excavators are neat, but too expensive for me, and require far too much power. Thus mu excavator uses ATV winches (meant to pull a 900 kg machine out of mud) to drive and work. Some of the winches have been disassembled: driving uses sprockets and "08" roller chain, turning the boom also uses sprockets and chain. Some of the winches are intact however: raising the boom uses a winch in factory condition, and pulling in the bucket in also uses a winch.

A big corner has been cut to gain strength asymmetrically and reduce complexity: I assumed I'm never going to do a pushing movement with the bucketed arm. So, where old-fashioned cable excavators used a super complicated winch system to extend the arm, I use a boring simple gas spring. Near-zero pushing-out power to gain the absolute maximum pulling-in power.

The Internet wouldn’t have developed under an anarchist system. Think of just the process of manufacturing a computer. All the different parts come from every part of the world. The computer chips come from Taiwan, the parts are then assembled in China, plastics from Vietnam, engineered by people in the United States.

You shouldn't be taking that for granted, but asking "why do they come from different countries?".

The answer? For historical reasons - because that's where capital found cheap labour with a tolerable infrastructure and convenient legislation at a certain time period.

If the goal is to imagine an anarchist society, Taiwan is not the memory factory of the world, and China isn't the consumer electronics factory of the world. It's perfectly feasible to make microchips everywhere and assemble them into systems too.

If the world being imagined doesn't favour (via laws that protect investment) investing huge sums of money overseas - outsourcing won't happen.

As for computers, the first programmable computer existed in ancient Greece (as a toy, of course). You could program a robot's driving movements using knotted rope. :) Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer in the 1800s, which Ada Lovelace wrote the first programs for. Alas, it didn't work - due to the limits of Victorian era manufacturing. Konrad Zuse designed computers using relays, and they worked. Computers are a thing that sooner or later appear, once need for automation and capability to manufacture components has arisen. Networking computers doesn't take an anarchist or hierarchist to figure out - it takes an engineer and coder to figure out.

Without postulating that in anarchy, engineers don't exist, mathematics doesn't exist, or coders won't exist once engineers build programmable computers... it's on very thin ice to say that an Internet can't exist.

It should be noted that anarcho-syndicalism is the only flavour of anarchism that has needed to supply anarchist units fighting a war (Spanish Civil War), and to raise foreign currency by exporting what it could, during a time of economic trouble - and it could do that.

Their system? Representatives from different plants regularly convened, discussed the inputs and outputs of their production, made agreements and resolved disputes. There was a market, a more transparent market than capitalism can provide - and the actors on this market had a democratic mandate from workers. Sometimes they traded for money, sometimes they exchanged services or goods for other services or other goods... sometimes they simply helped each other out (a step that's ridiculously hard to perform in capitalism).

However, there was also a government in the background - fighting on the same side as anarchists, with no power to spare for cracking down on syndicalism until much later.

I wish I knew what they did when some plant became indebted to another or failed its promises. I don't know if historians have written about it.

As for scaling - yes, transparency and trust don't scale infinitely. If the partner in a deal is distant in some way (geographically, politically, otherwise), one may not want to discuss everything with them. Thus, when a syndicalist company trades with a non-syndicalist company, they probably don't show their cards.

P.S.

A note about communications: the Barcelona telephone exchange continued to operate under anarchist control in the aforementioned situation. If they needed capacitors, resistors, lamps, speakers, relays or wire, I'm sure some other worker-controlled company could make those. Of course, Internet was not a thing back in the 1930-ties.

BBS-es and FidoNet existed on top of the telephone network before the Internet became a thing. BBS-es were largely amateur run dial-in servers and there was no central authority to steer their development. Fidonet was a standard, but nobody with authority stood behind it. Of course, its users were mostly DIY technology enthusiasts and weren't moving money, so much of the problems we encounter on the Internet (scams, ads, DRM, etc) were unknown of. Fidonet was not a "well run network", however - since long distance call rates placed a burden on node operators and even caused infighting.

Radio amateurs set their standards and started global communication without a central authority, states regulated their activity (with permits and punishments for violations) only later.

I very much doubt if we'd not have an Internet on an anarchist planet. I think we'd have a different Internet.

Reading the description, it's 99% likely to be true - but scalability is a whole different matter, much harder to predict.

I would recommend motor silicone, since it's often rated for 300 C. The surface being sealed should be scratched or sanded for better adhesion. After it has fully cured (several days), one should probably do about ten "test boils" to flush out anything that might seep into water.

I knew that cops can frame people, and in some areas they run wild without any checks to their power, but the incredible productivity of these cops is scary.

(Ironically, if someone would have taken justice into their own hands, they'd have been celebrated as hero martyrs for years.)

As a side note about framings: I think the biggest framing in all history occurred when software errors in a system built by ICL sent sub-postmasters to court and prison in the UK.

By 2022, 736 prosecutions had been identified, 83 convictions had been overturned and more were expected to be quashed. The number of those affected by other types of abuse by the Post Office, torts, breach of contract, coercion etc., has not been tabulated or published.

I think that if society wants to keep police, it has to ensure that it takes a stable personality with functioning ethics and reasonable intellect to get a job there. Becoming a cop should be equivalent to getting a doctor's degree in medicine, with plenty of possibilities for dropping out. The implication would be that cops would be scarce - that sort of society would want to reduce its crime levels via prevention.

Alternatively, a random selection of ordinary people might be chosen to investigate crimes. Lower efficacy, but far less chance of abuse.

As the bare minimum, allegations against the police should be investigated by some other institution - one which gets zero benefit from good relations with cops.

I think the same.

In the country where I live, thare are regions where the grid doesn't accept new production capacity - because installed capacity covers local demand and electricity cannot get where it would be needed.

Also, planning is slow and permits are issued slowly - I have an acquaintance who created a semi-legal solar park because waiting for permits would take too long. Electrically, everything is fine, professionals wrote the project and did the job. The parish just wasn't informed, only the grid company was. Since it's a small park, it flies under the radar. :o

My own installation isn't worthy of the name "solar park", but it's entirely outside law - to avoid needing a permit, I dropped the voltage, ran thicker copper (to make things work with lower voltage) and didn't get a grid connection. As a result, I didn't need to wait for someone to give me a permit.

Even if it seems a bit off topic (as a discussion / evaluation of old old discoveries), I read the transcript and would recommend it to someone who has a coffee break to spare. :)

Interesting essay, thanks. :) When I think of a subset of the problem (where will all the metals come from), I keep remembering that we still make cars out of steel. Thin steel, sometimes without even a layer of zinc to protect it...

...and it rusts (unless you live in very specific climates) within two decades. If there's snow on the road and you spray salt to prevent ice formation, it rusts faster. Since the product development cycle guarantees that spare parts cannot be found by that time, and manufacturers often design closed-source products and retain broad intellectual property rights, nobody complains much - a car is expected to be useless in 20 years, and we accept this... but must we?

In a solarpunk world, I would imagine that some cars are made of other materials - chemically digestible composites, aluminum (if a structure can be made totally rigid, aluminum is OK, if a structure flexes, aluminum is forbidden due to fatigue), plywood (the first airplanes heavily utilized plywood before aluminum replaced it)...

...and they will be open-source. Compatible parts can be made even if the original manufacturer closes down. As a result, there will be demand for longevity, and the "steel cycle" will turn a lot slower, with far less irreversible loss. At least I hope it will.