In the general form you post your question there are several answers, for example because the price of anarchy is too high (charger plugs), or the products at dangerous (drugs), or to avoid externalities. Whether there are good arguments in the case of streaming is a different question.

You just have to put your hard drive in a pressure vessel filled with helium.

It’s helium all the way down

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere. Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.

I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.

I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.

With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.

There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.

There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately.

I can't say I agree with the conclusion, but I commend you for the concise and poetic description of what most power plants fundamentally are.

Fusion power that uses steam turbines to convert heat into electricity will be more expensive than solar/wind

Only if we first colonize the Solar System, so land becomes too cheap to meter too.

I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not aware of this.

Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become He? Or would that make radioactive He?

The relevant cost for the buyer is how much they need to pay to obtain the object. So far we haven't discovered any primordial antimatter deposits that we could mine, so creating it from scratch is the only way.

Having a way to assert that the compiler does what you expect can be helpful in large projects with many contributors of different skill level. Having something fail when a random change breaks autovectorization can save a lot of time profiling. When a compiler upgrade changes codegen I would also prefer an assertion telling me about it so that I can run relevant benchmarks to see whether it’s an improvement or not. Relying on whole-system benchmarks is difficult due to noise.

Haskell has a package to make testing this sort of thing easier https://hackage.haskell.org/package/inspection-testing

Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.

Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?

I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.

A 2kW socket for ten hours over night will give you a hundred kilometers of range or so. A regular 11kW wall box can fully charge your car over night. How long is the typical commute you're thinking about? Fast charging is pretty much irrelevant day-to-day for people who can plug in at home or at work. The only time these people need fast chargers is during road trips.

> 2 kW socket

> kilometers

It's much more tenable in the 220V world, for sure.

But even if you only charge during road trips, the quality of the chargers during those road trips matters!

I doubt people here can give realistic estimates as to how quickly we can ramp up the production of e.g. heat pumps, since a lot depends on how much we're willing to pay for it. There are many areas where we have the technology to electrify, we just don't do it because at current fuel prices pay back times for electrification are too long. There are also simple things like better insulation for buildings that can dramatically reduce fuel demands.

The US produces much more natural gas than it consumes, so changes like this don't really make sense.

Europe started implementing these initiatives a couple of decades ago, it makes sense there as they are a net importer, with residential prices around 3x higher than the US. In my country a newly built house (very low energy demand) is often cheaper to heat with a heat pump than natural gas, especially if combined with solar PV - but that's still more expensive than a home in the US.

The most impactful usages are transportation, as everywhere basically everything is transported by road, and renewable electricity generation, so fossil fuels can be used elsewhere (residential, industrial, etc).

So Major Major‘s father is being paid to let land be available for rich biodiversity. Sounds not unreasonable to me.

Henry George would like a word.

You should be lobbying for cheap electricity so that people put heat pumps in their homes instead of burning diesel for heat.