Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier.
The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x.
Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation.
Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.
CO2 capture from the atmosphere, turning it into hydrocarbons. All the solar panels/wind farms combined have quite large surface that might be useful for the capture. Just need to figure out the mechanism to do it. Easy-peasy, right? :-)
What is more important than proclaimed words is to evaluate actions of the said government.
The Iranians have been pragmatic and relatively restrained, while USA and Israel have repeatedly escalated.
Iran has been helping USA dealing with Al Qaida in Afghanistan and Isis in Iraq. As a payback, they have been included into the 'Axis of Evil' and subjected to heavy sanctions. Just one of the cases...
> Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows).
This is nonsense, from the physics point of view.
The reason why rubber/fertilizer were replaced by oil/gas products is that
oil/gas has the energy needed for the (relatively simple) chemical transformations needed to obtain rubber/fertilizer from the feedstocks.
Splitting nitrogen into helium is a nuclear reaction that requires copious amounts of energy.
At least using fusion or collecting helium from Moon/Jupiter are physically sane, if economically insane.
For sure, there are plenty of such people. They are still very small minority.
Almost everybody I know has a tendency to not overly check the statements that broadly align with their world view, and be dismissive (as propaganda, without doing the work to check the ground truth data) of statements that are contrary.
> Just disable Microsoft/Google/AWS/Apple crap for them and they will be on their knees.
The dumb thing is that there are people in the US that actually believe this. Apparently including you. It would destroy the US as a trading partner and cause overnight implosion of the USD. If you thought brexit was an own goal this would be on another level entirely. But please, shout it around some more and prove the point that I've been making to every company that I've been involved with in the last decade: have a plan in case your cloud stuff isn't available anymore.
First, the US has recently done a lot of dumb shit and own goals. One never knows where is the boundary, especially if things escalate gradually.
Second, the spinelessness of 'the west' also seems unbounded (the failure to condemn Venezuela action, Iran war, or Israel's behaviour). Even after the Greenland fiasco. Carney's words at Davos seem very hollow, when one sees his reaction to Iran war. So, it might not even come to full stop of IT infrastructure, just 'a gentle warning'.
Third, the US has no problems screwing its partners, with those obediently bowing down; that is not a new phenomenon. Read on 1971 Connaly's statement "The dollar is our currency, but your problem."
Ah hahahaha. Yeah... No. Contrary to popular belief, the 2-300 year old upstart that is the United States doesn't have a magical lynchpin it can pull to get the other longstanding nations of the world to acquiesce entirely. If the U.S. really pushes things, it will soon find itself on the shit list of everyone else on whom we rely for implementing key links in the supply chain. I honestly do not understand where the gung ho America ooh rah comes from anymore these days. People, we sold out our industrial base. We sold out how to make things. We sold out everything that wasn't nailed down chasing cheaper payroll to undercut the American worker. This country is not as on it's own two feet as we like to believe. One need only look at the supply chain disruptions of the last decade to understand that.
Perhaps I should have formulated my post more precisely.
1) So much goodwill gone up in smoke. Yes.
a) Will the US stop wasting its goodwill? Well, that would be a new thing, so no. b) Will it exploit the dependence on its IT infrastructure muscle? Who knows? It exploited the dependence on it financial infrastructure, despite obvious long term consequences on trust in this financial infrastructure.
c) Will it come to truly turning off IT infrastructure? Probably not, the threat of that is sufficient, plus see 2).
2) My main beef is not with the US (I am not from US), its with Europe, for its spinelessness and inability to break its US dependence.
> 2) My main beef is not with the US (I am not from US), its with Europe, for its spinelessness and inability to break its US dependence.
Silicon Valley has an 'unfair advantage' in terms of capital available and the talent pool (though the latter is changing). This means that if you're going to roll something out you have a very good shot at cleaning up the EU market besides your home market because you will have the ability to massively undercut any EU competitors to the point that it would have to be an existential risk (after all your other EU competitors can do the same) to not do business with the US tech giants.
That's not spinelessness, that's sheer survival in a world where the table is massively tilted.
Breaking US dependence means breaking SV dependence and that's not even something the other states in the US have been able to do (Seattle got a head start and still didn't manage).
The same goes for the rest of the world...
Now, as to whether or not the EU could do better: so far, not really, because the main reason the EU does what it does is because it is a strong subscriber to free market principles, both within and without (and for better or for worse). The US has now burned a number of bridges which for most people in the EU (present company apparently excluded) were beyond the pale not that long ago.
So the tide is finally shifting: doing business with the US for critical services is now seen as a massive liability. This opens the door to local competition but that local competition still has to deal with various realities: environmental laws, anti-competitive legislation (which is stronger than in the USA) and a fractured linguistic environment as well as a lack of available capital. Those are - each by themselves - massive challenges that will need to be overcome.
I'm too old to take the lead in any of this - assuming I even could - so I'm happy to stand back to see what is going to happen and to help people see what is to their advantage and what is not. But I'm going to reserve judgment because I think that if you want to solve a problem you're going to have to work with people rather than to blame them for any of the ruts they're in.
The tilted table facing the Silicon Valley: Yes, definitively. The US is screaming murder regarding the others (China...) subsidizing their industries to gain monopoly advantage. That is exactly what US (via Venture Capital) is doing regarding the SV startups -- the whole model there is burning cash to scale quickly to market dominance.
If China and Russia have been able to (at least somehow) insulate themselves from US IT dominance, so should had Europe, at least for the most critical things. Hiding behind 'free market' ideology when the other (stronger!) side is not playing by the same rules is sheer stupidity.
Yeah, yeah, nobody could have foreseen the level US would abuse its power... if you wholeheartedly believed the spiel about the common values and interests. In reality, the US has always been very transactional and aggressive. Its just that with Trump the mask has come off.
So, here you are with your successful EU startup. This time you'll do things right. So you go and raise some EU VC in order to be able to fight off the SV competition. And miracle: it works, you are successful. You consolidate your EU presence and get to the point where even the SV competitors can no longer compete.
Oh nice, tell me what legal basis you will use to stop a takeover bid. Have a look at NXP and a whole raft of other absolutely critical companies whose shares eventually wound up in the hands of countries hostile to Europe.
We have a whole department in the EU that would like nothing better than to be able to stop these kind of things from happening but time and again the business world finds a way around it. That's one of the main issues with the EU: we play by the rules even if the rest of the world does not. But that's a very expensive principle to let go and I for one am happy that so far they have not, even if you think it is 'spineless' it actually is the opposite.
Iran is a large country, just getting to Tehran with large-enough force is logistically enormous task.
Complicated by the fact that the logistic convoys can nowadays be trivially decimated by FPVs.
Air superiority is not going to help you much against small dispersed resistance groups with FPVs (ideally fiber optics, so not detectable by emissions from afar).
There is a chance that there will be similar democratization with AA (you will need proper AA missiles, the physics of reaching a fast jet flying high simply demands it), but the distributed passive targeting is made much simpler with current commodity computing and optics.
Achieving AA Denial is difficult, but forcing the attacker to use standoff munitions instead of gravity bombs/close-in air support not so much: shifting the risk of losing an aircraft from 1 in 100000 to 1 in 100 will do it.
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