Peter Thiel warns of the AntiChrist and destruction of the US

[Loren Pechtel]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A simple non-answer.

A while back I looked the economics: The life cycle cost of all battery technologies exceeded the market value of the power they produce in that lifetime. I have not seen recent updates but I doubt this has changed. Batteries exist for load balancing, not for meaningful power storage. Batteries only make sense in environments you can't connect to the grid, or in a few cases where power is life-critical but you can't trust the grid.

The only reason solar appears to make sense is the government requires the utilities to pay for solar/wind as if they had the same value as other power, completely ignoring the economics of the lack of reliability. In reality the value of the solar/wind is the value of the fuel the generators don't need to use, that's it. You still need just as much grid, you still need just as many generators. And you have to limit the capacity--there are places where the utilities forbid new solar connections because the substations can't handle it. Those substations are designed to feed power from the grid to the houses, they are not built to feed power from the houses to the grid. The only path to avoiding a spectacular failure is to limit the solar generation on any grid segment to below the demand from that segment.

Note that a pure solar setup using current technology stores most of the power as hydrogen. And craters the economy by making power several times more expensive than it currently is. And you get the really ironic outcome that pure solar emits more carbon than nearly pure solar with a small amount of fossil fuels as backup. (The carbon is coming from the construction of the equipment, not from it's operation.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Related:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t

 

[Jarhyn]

Related:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t

So, once upon a time back when I was religious, I read the Left Behind series.

It wasn't well written, but it does provide a glimpse into what many millions of Christians think the end of the world will look like.

The thing I find so bizarre, however, is how blind those millions are to very similar events unfolding in reality.

I am utterly shocked and perplexed by the juxtaposition between stated beliefs and their willful worship of an antichristian figure.

Thiel is, himself, working on creating the dystopian forced loyalty system that you would expect from a biblical antichrist.

The Bible itself details that the greatest and most final mark of the end times will consist of a loyalty pledge under threat of execution, and the only people I see threatening execution or death are conservatives right now, and are openly calling for the reversal of victim and offender in our sensibilities.

Now, I'm not any great believer, but I'm at a loss over what to make of all this. Thiel, however, is clearly at or near the center of this Nexus of evil.

If he warns of the antichrist, it appears that his mirror was too shiny, that he could not tell he was looking at his own reflection.

 

[Toni]

AI uses a lot of energy, causing the average person's power bill to rise and who knows what all it's doing to the environment.

Not a problem for long, hopefully.
Oklo’s first power generator, the Aurora powerhouse, is expected to go online in late 2027 or early 2028 at the Idaho National Laboratory. I have high hopes for it.
Their mini-nuke is designed to operate off-grid, generating power specifically for data centers and other high-consumption sites, and I think it will go beyond that if allowed to progress. Anyhow, I’m glad to see some tech billionaire power people embracing the concept of decentralized power generation - and increasingly, backing it.

(Stock I bought a year ago for $12.80 is over $150.00 at the moment, and I think it could go another 10x in the next few years. It fluctuates pretty wildly (up 9% today’s with the indices off 1-2%) but is still listed as a “buy” with a $175 target.)

Penn Gillette of Penn and Teller wrote an essay about Las Vegas and characterized it as city built on "bad math". He said everyday, thousands of people travel to Las Vegas and see waterfalls in the desert, pyramids, and places where the lights are never turned off. According to Gillette, none of these arriving bad mathematicians thinks to ask, "How do they pay for all of this?"

That's the real question. Ginormous data centers cost a lot to build and a lot to run, and a lot to maintain.

If I were thinking about building a toothbrush factory, the calculations would be fairly straightforward, once I knew the price of a toothbrush, what it would cost to make a toothbrush, and the market for toothbrushes. I would hope future toothbrush sales would cover my costs and return a profit on my investment.

All these data centers seem more defensive than economic. Tech bros want a data center because they don't want to be the only one without a data center. Back to the real question. What are they going to produce that can be sold at a price to cover expenses? Macroeconomics has a term know as margin cost of production. What does it cost to produce one more toothbrush? A cyber product, whether it's answer to a Google search or a high school students term paper, has a marginal cost of zero. When the data centers enter the market and have to compete with each other, how will they price the product? Will competition become a race to the bottom between all centers and the only goal is to pay this month's electric bill.

In the year 2025, I'll wager there are more shut down automobile factories than there are operating ones. Factories of all kinds close all the time. It doesn't matter how much was invested to build it, when it can't pay for itself, it's dead.

When a data center shuts down, it will not only kill the jobs inside the fence, but also the jobs in all the infrastructure built to support it. If I had a crystal ball, it would probably show me some WorldCon/Enron/FTX level bankruptcies in the future.

My big concerns re: data centers are in fact the data they collect and generate —and the enormous amounts of wear they consume.

 

[Toni]

Related:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t

I’m not certain of the purpose of this article ( not commenting on you linking—thank you for that!). Is it to expose Thiel as a religious nut? Is it to attract more religious nuts to him? I would wager Thiel would like to have more cult members.

 

[Toni]

But it isn’t a choice between coal vs nuclear. Solar has much better potential for clean energy.

Solar is currently non-viable and that is not expected to change. Solar isn't consistent, you need fossil fuel plants ready to take up the load.

Also I don’t know if you’ve had nuclear accidents in Australia but we’ve had them in the US and also in Russia. Ongoing cleanup and decommissioning continues to this day re; Three Mile Island, beginning in 1979. So 46 years later, it’s not all fixed. Waste material was shipped more than 2000 miles from Pennsylvania to Idaho.

Three Mile Island: Some NRC guys were on site and took a perfectly manageable incident and turned it into destruction of a reactor. Death toll: zero. Effective risk: basically zero. If you were standing at the reactor fence when it happened would evacuating be a good idea? You come to your first street--nope, crossing one street is more dangerous than staying put for the duration.

Chernobyl: Major mistake, killed dozens. The predicted mass radiation deaths did not appear.

Fukushima: Once again, a case of meddling. The engineers knew they had to vent, the politicians would not permit it. The stuff they didn't vent blew up. Even with the politician's meddling the expected death toll was zero. They meddled once again, evacuating the city and killing hundreds in the process. That one fake problem killed more than all real nuclear issues have. Growing food in the city probably wouldn't have been a good idea, but it shouldn't have been evacuated.

There have been plenty of industrial accidents with other power sources. There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

Again, if only there were…batteries!

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet. A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

 

[Toni]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A simple non-answer.

A while back I looked the economics: The life cycle cost of all battery technologies exceeded the market value of the power they produce in that lifetime. I have not seen recent updates but I doubt this has changed. Batteries exist for load balancing, not for meaningful power storage. Batteries only make sense in environments you can't connect to the grid, or in a few cases where power is life-critical but you can't trust the grid.

The only reason solar appears to make sense is the government requires the utilities to pay for solar/wind as if they had the same value as other power, completely ignoring the economics of the lack of reliability. In reality the value of the solar/wind is the value of the fuel the generators don't need to use, that's it. You still need just as much grid, you still need just as many generators. And you have to limit the capacity--there are places where the utilities forbid new solar connections because the substations can't handle it. Those substations are designed to feed power from the grid to the houses, they are not built to feed power from the houses to the grid. The only path to avoiding a spectacular failure is to limit the solar generation on any grid segment to below the demand from that segment.

Note that a pure solar setup using current technology stores most of the power as hydrogen. And craters the economy by making power several times more expensive than it currently is. And you get the really ironic outcome that pure solar emits more carbon than nearly pure solar with a small amount of fossil fuels as backup. (The carbon is coming from the construction of the equipment, not from it's operation.)

Solar power now accounts for 22% of electrical power in the EU. Germany generates more solar power than Spain, despite having fewer hours of sunlight.

Do I think that solar power will provide for all of our energy needs? No. But I think that renewable energy is the only way to go, along with changes in rampant consumerism, more is more thinking and a much stronger emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Again, if only there were…batteries!

I addressed them in another post.

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet. A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

Are you going to volunteer to be one of the ones that dies? Because your "answer" kills most of the human race--and only postpones the collapse.

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

No.

Solar and wind have the same problem: storage. Without viable storage techniques (which do not currently exist even at lab scale) they're a route to self destruction. Keeping pushing on development of the energy collectors fails to address this fundamental problem.

Geothermal works but is very limited. There's only a few areas with enough underground heat to tap. We could build better ways to tap it but that doesn't produce more to tap.

The only viable sources today are coal/oil/gas/nuclear.

 

[Elixir]

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

None of those competes with nuclear. It’s not even close.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Solar power now accounts for 22% of electrical power in the EU. Germany generates more solar power than Spain, despite having fewer hours of sunlight.

So? Works during the day, fossil fuel at night.

Do I think that solar power will provide for all of our energy needs? No. But I think that renewable energy is the only way to go, along with changes in rampant consumerism, more is more thinking and a much stronger emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

It's not live within our means, it's die. The greens imagine a utopia of small communities, ignoring the fact that such a model can't support anywhere near the number of people alive today. Nor can small communities do big things. The biggest problem I'm aware of is chip fabricators--small communities can't produce more than a trickle of chips. Remove the big things, we soon die. "Green" has long been a Russian disinformation plot--just look at their positions, when there's one option good for the people and one good for Moscow they always take the one that benefits Moscow. Same as the "pro life" community always takes the position that makes sex dangerous, not the one that reduces the problem.

 

[laughing dog]

Again, if only there were…batteries!

I addressed them in another post.

Not really. Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet. A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

Are you going to volunteer to be one of the ones that dies? Because your "answer" kills most of the human race--and only postpones the collapse.

Are you posting drunk because creating more efficient users of energy had been going on for centuries without massive killoffs of people.

 

[Jarhyn]

Solar, nuclear, coal train derailments or thread derailments? Why not have all of the above!

YOU get a derailed coal train, and YOU get a leaky oil pipeline, and YOU get a destroyed boundary waters recreational industrial area, and YOU get a destroyed city because people are paranoid about "invisible" non-existent or minimal cancer risks (less than a medical image or plane trip or field trip to a banana plantation).

You all get fucked. Forever. All your nice things gone because of propaganda. Enjoy the derailments. They will continue until you are dead. There is no punchline. I'm crying too.

 

[Toni]

Solar power now accounts for 22% of electrical power in the EU. Germany generates more solar power than Spain, despite having fewer hours of sunlight.

So? Works during the day, fossil fuel at night.

Do I think that solar power will provide for all of our energy needs? No. But I think that renewable energy is the only way to go, along with changes in rampant consumerism, more is more thinking and a much stronger emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

It's not live within our means, it's die. The greens imagine a utopia of small communities, ignoring the fact that such a model can't support anywhere near the number of people alive today. Nor can small communities do big things. The biggest problem I'm aware of is chip fabricators--small communities can't produce more than a trickle of chips. Remove the big things, we soon die. "Green" has long been a Russian disinformation plot--just look at their positions, when there's one option good for the people and one good for Moscow they always take the one that benefits Moscow. Same as the "pro life" community always takes the position that makes sex dangerous, not the one that reduces the problem.

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Solar Integration: Solar Energy and Storage Basics

Storage helps solar contribute to the electricity supply even when the sun isn’t shining by releasing the energy when it's needed.

www.energy.gov

 

[Toni]

Related:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t

So, once upon a time back when I was religious, I read the Left Behind series.

It wasn't well written, but it does provide a glimpse into what many millions of Christians think the end of the world will look like.

The thing I find so bizarre, however, is how blind those millions are to very similar events unfolding in reality.

I am utterly shocked and perplexed by the juxtaposition between stated beliefs and their willful worship of an antichristian figure.

Thiel is, himself, working on creating the dystopian forced loyalty system that you would expect from a biblical antichrist.

The Bible itself details that the greatest and most final mark of the end times will consist of a loyalty pledge under threat of execution, and the only people I see threatening execution or death are conservatives right now, and are openly calling for the reversal of victim and offender in our sensibilities.

Now, I'm not any great believer, but I'm at a loss over what to make of all this. Thiel, however, is clearly at or near the center of this Nexus of evil.

If he warns of the antichrist, it appears that his mirror was too shiny, that he could not tell he was looking at his own reflection.

Exactly my thought.

 

[bilby]

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

 

[Elixir]

Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Hmmm. Not with lithium though. Current storage capacities are nearing theoretical limits of that medium.

 

[bilby]

Again, if only there were…batteries!

Again, if only.

But wishing isn't a viable energy policy. And energy storage isn't physically achievable at the necessary scale without massive environmental destruction.

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves

It is literally impossible to do otherwise.

instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet.

Like battery storage solar? I agree.

We should, as far as possible, use the least destructive energy source we can - nuclear fission.

A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

Sure. But efficiency goes only so far. We will still need plenty of electricity, and the safest and least environmentally harmful option, by far, is nuclear fission.

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

No, that's exactly what we need to stop doing. Wasting time, effort, and money on technologies that are demonstrably second or third best is dumb. And it is destroying our environment completely needlessly.

 

[bilby]

Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Hmmm. Not with lithium though. Current storage capacities are nearing theoretical limits of that medium.

Well we will just need to find a solid element with a lighter nucleus then.

Oh, wait.

Shit.

 

[bilby]

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Sure. At huge cost, both in dollars, and to the environment. It cannot be scaled up enough to make 100% wind and solar a viable option for everyone.

Lithium isn't free, nor is mining it benign to the environment. The same is true of the minerals required to make high efficiency PV panels.

We currently store a minuscule fraction of the solar power we generate, but already we are seeing stuff like this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.c...re-at-bouldercombe-big-battery-in-queensland/

The irony is that those who claim, counterfactually, that nuclear power is too dangerous and environmentally damaging, are advocating for an alternative that is far more dangerous, and far more environmentally damaging.

 

[Toni]

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Sure. At huge cost, both in dollars, and to the environment. It cannot be scaled up enough to make 100% wind and solar a viable option for everyone.

Lithium isn't free, nor is mining it benign to the environment. The same is true of the minerals required to make high efficiency PV panels.

We currently store a minuscule fraction of the solar power we generate, but already we are seeing stuff like this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.c...re-at-bouldercombe-big-battery-in-queensland/

The irony is that those who claim, counterfactually, that nuclear power is too dangerous and environmentally damaging, are advocating for an alternative that is far more dangerous, and far more environmentally damaging.

I’ve never advocated for only solar energy.