[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

[Keith Lofstrom]

> From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> 
>  >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700
> horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs.  

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument.

No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout
misanthropic hallucinations instead" argument.  I'm sorry
you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who
dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when
I go east to Portland.

TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single day,
TM> don't you?  At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your job.
TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it in a
TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV.   There's a LOT of energy in solar
TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to be.
TM> But that is coming.

So many claims, so little time.

I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers
like me.  Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to
practical maximum, increasing from 15% to 16% over two
decades.  Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC
factories in China.  Concentrator system efficiency has
more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not.  

In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed 
natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will
emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of greenhouse
gas CO₂ back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper.

Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global
warming, but I've done the physics and the math, and
I'm afraid they are mostly correct.  I take comfort in
the fact that they are entirely mistaken about systems
and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone.

Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons.
That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia,
Chile, China, and Argentina.  The US extracts 1% of the
world supply, though we have 4% of the lithium brine
reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day
storage for millions of electric vehicles.  Extracting
that lithium creates a LOT of pollution.

----

I've published journal papers about an entirely different
approach to energy storage. 

A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy
storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer;
On winter nights, we use power generated by summer day
PV in Australia (at other times South America or China
or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus.

http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop

The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop
demo maglev systems.

The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and
mutual cooperation.  I'm not holding my breath, sigh. 

DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said
they should find energetic younger researchers to do the
work.  I explained that the system capacity scales as
the square of the cost; double the cost, quadruple the 
delivered value.  Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and
sorta useless.  A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times
the expense, but a million times the productivity and
usefulness.  Still not global scale.

That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks
who haven't ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to
tera-transistor solid state memories.  I expect thousands
will understand it, out of billions who've never wielded
a wafer probe.  Anyway ...

A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more
expensive, 10,000 times more productive, but damned
difficult to protect from sabotage in parts of the world
that "we" don't control.  It would serve billions of people
around the Pacific Rim.  Probably five or ten giant systems,
for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. 

But as always, billions of resentful people will be left
out.  It doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes
into skyscrapers, or depth-charge undersea energy systems.

The principal construction materials would be iron (for
the rotor) and aluminum (for the wiring).  Plus a shit
ton of electronics; a small but costly silicon mass
fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire and rotor.

Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year.

Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds
of millions of stationary and mobile batteries, or any
of the other green technologies relying on constrained
resources and giant mining and giant factories that we
haven't started building yet.  This isn't as easy as a
blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet.

And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side
effects requiring costly mitigations.  The world is way
too crowded to throw our shit over the fence; the people
on the other side will fire artillery shells back IF WE
ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we AREN'T lucky.

------------------------------------

KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences of Mass
KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane.  Published in 2001, and >sitting
KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since.  Shane claimed that laptop screens
KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth.

TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all.

The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved
for 360 degree awareness, combining saccades of our 
retinal fovea into a much larger gestalt "image" of the
landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T.  It isn't the
screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and
the brain regions they drive, and how those affect us
semi-evolved social apes and our cooperative skills. 

Or lack thereof, fellow geeks!

Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a
large fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly
cooperative humans.  Shane was a media consultant; his
job was to peddle media effectiveness, but his avocation
was asking "What does this mean?  What might happen?"

Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation.
More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate)
such skills, even if they have fewer of them.  The mind
blind, not so much.  I tend toward the latter, sigh.

Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge
of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.)

TM> The problems aren't tech.  The problems are people and always have been.

And the most important problem is that crazy person I
see in the mirror, darkly.  Apostle Paul referenced
that mirror before Star Trek.  We may never learn
where Paul plagiarized it from. 

"Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso)

Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism.  
Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment.

Keith L.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com