Bondi refuses legitimate Senate questioning and threatens Senators. She needs to be arrested by the sergeant-at-arms.

Even then, they already aren’t.

He wants no less than to start killing everyone else, en masse.

Are those on the manufacturer’s spec sheet? 'Cause that’s what the comment I was replying to was talking about.

In other words, you’re proving my point that you have to do research to find that stuff out.

Manufacturers are literally removing buttons and dials to force functionality to be accessed only through the accompanying “app.”

Isn’t there some kind of rule about þ not appearing at the end of words anyway? I feel like I vaguely remember something about that, but I’m not sure.

Show me where the spec sheet for a typical smart appliance tells me if it has a good integration with Home Assistant, whether I can flash it with ESPHome, etc.

Usually spec sheets only talk about a bunch of proprietary bullshit I don’t give a fuck about (or actively don’t want).

The information on whether it runs its own DNS isn’t on the “features list.” Or information about what microcontroller it’s running and whether it’s possible to flash with third-party firmware. Hell, even information on compatibility with Home Assistant itself usually isn’t on it! Features lists never include the sorts of information people like us care about in a smart appliance.

Me waiting for Emily to start a Linux channel

Oh, that was real? I saw the title on a video in my feed and assumed it was some kind of clickbait.

The trouble is, you don’t know how bad the shit is until after you get it home, unless you do a large amount of research beforehand.

Frankly, at this point I think the better tactic is to buy the smart appliances and then return them as “not fit for purpose,” even though that takes even more effort, because it punishes the manufacturer in a way that merely not buying the thing in the first place does not.

They persist in trying to bring back thorn.

14 is higher than they want the age of consent to be, so that tracks.

I’m still mad about JavaScript existing at all.

That happens to be fossil fuel propaganda for e-fuels.

No, it doesn’t, because it’s my own original thought and I’m not a fossil fuel propaganist.

I’m not talking about fucking cracking natural gas; I’m talking about building an electrolysis plant running on renewable electricity next to a former refinery doing all the hydrocarbon chemistry that has been adaptively reused to make synthetic fuel. The hydrogen is not supposed to be coming from petroleum!

Furthermore these are net 0 fuels which are not good enough, or as good as green fuels.

On the contrary, carbon neutral is absolutely good enough. Why the hell wouldn’t it be?!

Again, H2 or Ammonia, are the right long term fuels.

Again, you’re wrong about H₂ because throwing out all the liquid fuel infrastructure we already have to switch to the most difficult-to-handle choice short of something hypergolic is just fundamentally stupid.

I don’t know anything about ammonia; maybe it really is the right solution. It’s kind of a different topic, though. Do you want to start talking about that instead?

Obviously, an H2 economy has to be green H2 based.

It has to be that to be a good thing, but it doesn’t have to be that to exist. There are plenty of people pushing for spending $$$$$$$$$ on fuel cell cars and hydrogen fuel stations even when they’re just being used with cracked natural gas for no actual environmental benefit.

It’s like pretending your diesel car is green even though you’ve never put a drop of B100 in it.

Pure H2 will always be cheaper than e-fuels, because the latter is more steps.

At the point of production, sure. At the point of use, not so much, since hydrogen is so much more difficult/expensive to store and transport.

more range due to [H₂] being the highest energy density fuel.

Energy density by weight, not by volume. It doesn’t do much good to have longer range if you can’t carry enough cargo because too much of the plane is taken up by fuel tanks.

He’s not “defend[ing] fascism;” he’s explaining to you how voting works. The government does actually have a legitimate need to know which Congressional district you’re in when you’re voting for your Congressional rep! That applies with the state administering elections as it does now, and it would still need to apply in your hypothetical scenario where the Federal government administered elections for Federal office.

such as commercial trucking

Mostly unnecessary; that’s what freight trains are for. (Short-haul from freight depot to loading dock can be handled by battery electric trucks.)

shipping

Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you’re not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn’t tolerate being becalmed (and I’m not falling for that article’s “up to 90%” claim either, BTW – I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.

aviation

Not much you can do about how much fuel a given flight uses… but you can reduce the number of flights by shifting travelers to high-speed passenger rail instead.

mining, construction, etc.

In other words, stuff that doesn’t actually go anywhere (instead just driving back and forth on a site that probably has good access to the grid or a generator), which means it’s (comparatively) real easy to electrify.

growing crops for biodiesel

Who said anything about that? I was talking about waste veggie oil.

I’m not sure you fully appreciate how large a reduction in automobile/trucking/shipping/construction equipment fuel use I’m proposing. I’m saying we should electrify or modal-shift so much of the demand that biodiesel made from just the stuff thrown out by restaurants and meat-packing plants and whatnot – without even growing bespoke crops for it – could satisfy most of what remains.

Just to be clear, green synthetic fuels are a huge ask. We will need direct air capture of CO2 before it is feasible at scale.

Okay, good point. I was thinking about how we have all that point-source CO₂ coming from our legacy fossil fuel power plants, but we’d still also need a separate source of clean electricity. If we built that, it would make more sense to replace the fossil fuel plant with it than to augment it. You’d have to refine the transportation fuel from petroleum the normal way, but that’s more efficient than doing the hydrogen synthesis thing using dirty electricity.

FYI, batteries are themselves never going to be truly green. You will always have a dirty supply chain for their production and mining. Today, that requires vast amounts of fossil fuels to be used. Even if you really believe batteries can solve most of transportation, there will still be a major reason to abandon BEVs in transportation at some point in the future.

Hey now, I didn’t say that! I was just talking about the relative merits of batteries vs. fuel cells vs. normal combustion engines running on synthetic or bio fuels.

The real way to “solve most of transportation” is zoning reform that results in cities with walkable density. Bicycles come in second, and rail transit a distant third. Cars of any type are really only suitable for the 20% of the population that’s rural, service vehicles, contractors and delivery people that need to haul bigger loads than fit on a cargo bike, etc.

(Speaking of which, once you reduce the demand for vehicle fuel that much, stuff like biodiesel made from waste veggie oil starts to look plentiful enough to make a decent dent in the market. That, at least, has been a solved problem for decades, and I’ve got the '90s VW and B100 fuel receipts to prove it.)

Anyway, I’m still pretty skeptical about building out an entire “economy” around storage and distribution of a gas that’s so famously difficult to store that it can leak straight through metal, and more bullish than you are on synthetic fuel processes that we’ve known how to do for a century but just haven’t bothered commercializing/scaling up because fossil fuels have been too cheap, but I’m kinda running out of motivation to continue defending my position on it. Thanks for the interesting discussion!

Having enough electrolyzers for that is still a huge investment. Plenty of naysayers have said, and still are saying, that this alone is impossible.

Wat?

An electrolytic cell is just a couple of chunks of metal stuck in some water and hooked up to a voltage source, plus some tubes to collect the gases. It’s so simple elementary school kids could build one in science class, and (unlike the proton exchange membrane in a fuel cell) requires no exotic materials or complicated-to-manufacture components.

No one is wedded to the idea of always using pure H2 for everything. The pro-H2 position is simply pointing out that green hydrogen is necessary for solving climate change, even if that means making synthetic fuels in the end.

If that’s true, we’ve been talking past each other and don’t disagree as much as it seemed. But I’m not convinced it is. Every time I’ve seen folks talking about the “hydrogen economy,” it’s in the context of building out a shitload of infrastructure for carting gaseous H₂ around, with zero mention of making synthetic liquid fuels.

And that latter part is the point I care about: it’s true that batteries are never gonna be viable for stuff like aviation, but gaseous H₂ fuel cells won’t be either. The real future for that stuff looks a lot like the present, except using non-fossil feedstocks to make the same sorts of fuels we’re already using. That could mean fuel synthesized from hydrogen, or biofuel, or some mix of both – it doesn’t even matter as long as it performs the same as the Jet A or whatever you’re trying to replace – but it’s definitely gonna be a liquid that’s easy to handle with the infrastructure we already have and it’s probably gonna be burned in the same sorts of combustion engines we’re already using, not reacted in a fuel cell.

The goal is carbon-neutral fuel made from non-fossil sources, for those use-cases batteries aren’t good for. Hydrogen is only part of one possible solution, and a pretty incidental part at that. Talking about the “hydrogen economy” is missing the point.

But it is worth saying that using pure H2 is not some huge challenge. Having to use cryogenic fuels or high pressure tanks are already possible in cars today.

It’s “possible,” sure, but at huge cost and complexity that means it’s flat out dumb compared to using a liquid fuel. And that’s never gonna change.

By the way, I’d like to get back to my original “greenwashing scam” point for a minute. Consider that there are two orthogonal issues here:

• the feedstock for the fuel (fossil coal/petroleum/natural gas vs. sustainable “green” H₂ or biofuels)
• the technology for distributing and using it (liquid fuels and combustion engines vs. gaseous fuels and fuel cells that provide electricity)

With “the hydrogen economy,” a huge emphasis is placed on the latter of those two issues, while the former is just sort of hand-waved as a trivial detail we’ll get to later, even though transitioning from “gray” to “green” hydrogen is also a huge unsolved problem that isn’t trivial at all.

Meanwhile, with liquid fuels and combustion engines, the latter is a solved problem, so there’s no excuse to direct less than full attention to the former.

So if you’re an entity with a vested interest in fossil fuel extraction, what’re you gonna do? You’re gonna push for hydrogen, of course, because it provides a whole extra set of distracting issues for engjneers and tree-huggers to occupy themselves with that aren’t getting down to the brass tacks of actually replacing the fossil feedstock with a sustainable one.