2024-05-11
etc
-
Will Stone Replace Steel and Concrete? - by Brian Potter
Why should we expect stone to get cheaper than concrete or steel? The basic argument is that stone is expensive primarily because of the high cost of finishing it: it requires skilled masons to carve quarried stone into the proper shape, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. As automation gets better, these costs will fall, making stone construction substantially cheaper than it is now. Springut’s company, Monumental, makes robotically-carved stone statues, and he thinks incredibly cheap automated stoneworking is near. Most folks in the building industry will immediately roll their eyes at this claim, but there are actually some good reasons to believe that stone might be cheaper than concrete or steel if labor costs fall enough. Stone has an arguably simpler supply chain than concrete or steel, and it can potentially eliminate certain on-site construction tasks.
According to stone proponents, these various advantages make stone inherently superior to concrete and steel. It’s only the high labor costs of working with the material that has prevented stone from being used widely. A small but vocal group of architects and engineers is advocating for the return to stone construction, though their arguments are more focused on the carbon benefits of stone — stone’s simpler and less energy-intensive supply chain means that it theoretically has much lower embodied carbon than concrete or steel.
However, I think most of these pro-stone arguments are much weaker than they seem, and I would be very surprised if stone made a comeback as a structural material. A key question for stone advocates is not whether finishing stone can be automated (it obviously can), or whether that will reduce costs (it obviously will), but what sort of scale effects are possible.
Horseshit
-
The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of America's food waste problem
-
Art Directors Guild Suspends Production Design Initiative Program
Due to an internal technical error, applicants to our Production Design Initiative (PDI) program received an email that had not been edited or fact-checked and was not intended to be widely distributed. As an early draft, the data points included in the email (such as “more than 75% of our members are unemployed and many have not been working for 18 months or more”) were not fact-checked and may be inaccurate.
-
US tech industry meets to organize against China, defend role in Gaza slaughter
Milley further justified Israel’s killing of more than 20,000 women and children in Gaza as no different from previous actions by the United States: “Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel’s doing, and I feel horrible for the innocent people in Gaza that are dying, but we shouldn’t forget that we, the United States, killed a lot of innocent people in Mosul, in Raqqa,” respectively referring to at least 3,200 civilians being killed by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces in the battle against the Islamic State between October 2016 and March 2017, and more than 1,600 killed by US-led coalition strikes in Raqqa later that year.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Musk
-
Elon Musk's Neuralink Had a Brain Implant Setback. It May Come Down to Design
-
Tesla's layoffs threaten to slow Biden's program to electrify highways
-
Elon Musk Changes Tune on Tesla Superchargers After Mass Firing
-
Elon Musk's X loses lawsuit against Bright Data over data scraping
-
Analyst on Starlink's rapid rise: "Nothing short of mind-blowing"
-
Climate protesters try to break into Tesla's Germany factory
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
-
Hysterics for Hamas: Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos?
-
Why Isn’t the Dept of Education Reporting on Sex Abuse in Public Schools?
It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee.
-
Ohio State Alum Gives Worst Commencement Speech Ever While High On Drugs
If that wasn't enough, Pan then decided to lead the crowd in two musical singalongs. First up was "What's Going On?" by the Four Non Blondes, which was an ironic choice given that everyone in attendance was wondering the same thing. The other song was "This Little Light Of Mine" by Harry Dixon Loes.
-
We Looked at All Recent Evidence on Mobile Phone Bans in Schools: What We Found
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
The original social media apps on Android were built by Google.
-
SpaceX's satellite internet surprises analysts with $6.6B revenue
-
OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say
-
Microsoft to Launch Mobile Game Store in July, Vying with Apple, Google
-
Considering the splash yesterday and today: this is Apple's mist effective ad spend in a some time: Professor sues Meta to allow release of feed-killing tool for Facebook
-
Is the 'Crush' Backlash a Dead Canary in the Apple Brand Coal Mine?
-
Apple shouldn't have apologized for its iPad Pro 'Crush' ad – Macworld
-
The outrage is far out of proportion to anything a commercial enterprise could possibly do. Apple fans are a cult; and they feel betrayed, deep in the values, by that ad. Their source of Holiness has emitted Heresy.
-
Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter
I think the core, critical sin was choosing the advertising model to begin with. Brand advertising is not like direct advertisement, which is more programmatic. It requires something like a Disney to essentially give you a favor, because the only players that matter to them are Google and Facebook. Snapchat, Twitter, everything else did not matter. And these are ads that are essentially throwaway for them. But we made that choice in order to go public.
When our activist came in, I offered to step down as CEO and the board wanted to go in a different direction. I didn't want to be on a board with an activist. I didn't want to run a company like that. It's just a Wall Street mess. It's not creative, it's diminishing. But the board said no. So at that point, I'm like, okay, I have to plan an exit. It's not going to be right now, but it has to be over the next two years, because I just don't want to live this way.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
-
Groundbreaking spaceplane crashes before landmark aerospike rocket test
The MIRA I, from German aerospace startup Polaris Raumflugzeuge, was traveling at approximately 105 mph (169 km/h) during takeoff when a "landing gear steering reaction" plus a side wind caused a "hard landing event," rendering the space plane inoperable and it's fiberglass airframe damaged beyond repair. This ill-fated test was set to be MIRA I's first chance to fire its AS-1 LOX (Liquid Oxygen)/kerosene linear aerospike rocket engine in actual flight – and indeed, the first time any aerospike engine had been properly flight-tested in an actual aircraft.
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
-
Citing Safety, New York Moves Mentally Ill People Out of the Subway - The New York Times
Medical workers and police officers are removing people suffering from psychiatric distress. The most troubled are forced to the hospital.
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
-
What Xi Jinping gets wrong about China’s economy
Mr Xi is also familiar with Chinese overcapacity. In his first term, his main economic policy was supply-side structural reform. In 2016 the state cut coal capacity by 290m tonnes and steel capacity by over 60m. China removed more capacity in these industries than most countries have ever possessed. But in Paris, Mr Xi rejected Europe’s concerns, at least in the new-energy industry: “The so-called ‘problem of China’s overcapacity’ does not exist, either from the perspective of comparative advantage or in light of global demand.” Who is right? China’s problem is not always as easy to spot as Europe’s mountains and lakes. “Capacity” sounds like a technical term, which might be measured in tonnes or cubic metres. But it is rarely economical to run a plant at its full technical limits. Moreover, in a rapidly growing economy that is evolving quickly, existing capacity can become obsolete or overwhelmed faster than in a mature economy, as Dianqing Xu of Huron University College and Ying Liu of Dongbei University of Finance and Economics have argued.