• 5 Posts
  • 295 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I hadn’t thought of the breakfast, but fried egg on toast would be great.

    Pajama morning watching a film with the kids and having a Forza mini league. Vehicle handicap to even out the odds.

    Out to Macdonalds for lunch, Water World in the afternoon, curry and a pint for tea in front of another film.

    I would be prepared to swap Water World or the morning film for building a giant lego castle and waging war against the invaders.




  • If Rory Stewart were standing in my constituency, I would be very tempted to vote for him. In his work he’s now an advocate of alleviating many of the problems in the poorest communities globally by giving no-conditions cash. Who knew that the problems of poverty could be solved with money?!!!

    He’s also a reasonable person and one who I think genuinely wants good things for the country in general rather than just for rich folk. He actually wants Britain to be governed well and in the interests of the population. He has some blind spots of course, he wouldn’t be a Conservative of he didn’t, but he’s decent and there’s hope that he can be persuaded by evidence of benefit.


  • Natural gas burns, but hydrogen explodes.

    Gas can explode too, it’s just we’re so used to it that the danger is no longer immediately apparent to the average person.

    No. Desperately misleading.

    That’s like saying that Biden says untrue things too, not just Trump. There’s an incredible difference in scale, and lying is very normal behaviour for Trump.

    (Also, everyone knows natural gas can explode, it’s just that the danger is actually pretty low.)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety

    Natural gas burns in ratios only up to under 20%, whereas Hydrogen burns in ratios well over 95%, maybe up to 97% and down to about 4% meaning that you need hardly any oxygen at the top end and hardly any hydrogen at the bottom end for an explosion - so it’s easy to get it lit and the whole lot goes up at once. Usually, not in rare cases. If you have a hydrogen leak, you have a high potential for oxygen ingress and you need vanishingly small amounts of oxygen for the whole lot to go up at once. That’s what an explosion is.

    That’s what I meant by natural gas burning - that’s its normal behaviour when you pipe it somewhere and light it at the exit. Where it meets the air, it burns, but that burning doesn’t spread through your pipe or container unless your pipe or container has become mainly air. By contrast, it’s very hard indeed to consistently have a controlled burn of hydrogen over decades without a large scale explosion, but with natural gas that’s nowhere near as hard.

    Hydrogen is low carbon, but it’s incredibly dangerous. There are far better low carbon energy solutions that actually work and aren’t as catastrophically dangerous. DO NOT get a hydrogen car if they ever make one. DO NOT get hydrogen piped into your home if they’re ever stupid enough to attempt this.

    Hydrogen looks like a good solution if you’re a fossil fuel company - your customers are buying a product that you can label as environmentally friendly while you generate it as usual by burning high carbon fossil fuels. What you don’t want if you’re a fossil fuel company is solutions where you’re irrelevant like solar, batteries, hydro, and the cheapest energy of all - wind.

    but you’re not going to get the same output from letting a load of water run down a hill.

    Tell that to Canada!

    Hydrogen has a higher energy density, very much so, yes, but that’s a silly argument against using water and gravity for electricity generation.









  • Young people don’t want to give up their weekends doing unpaid “mandatory volunteer” work either, though. There’s no actually good option here for young people.

    Let them get a good education, let them build a career, let them use spare hours for extra earning or relaxation, because their property costs are astronomical. Don’t sacrifice them further just for political gain.

    It’s true to form for the Conservatives, though. You were sacrificed for political gain if you were low paid, if you needed healthcare or social care, if you were disabled, if you were trans, and pretty much if you weren’t a wealthy outright property-owner.