We need to move zoning to the federal level like Japan

We must decide whether we’ll be a civilization that bows to NIMBYism and stays stuck in squalor or allow building the future.

Once again nonsense, productivity has been increasing in America over the last 20 years but real wages have not.

As always, don’t confuse textbook theory with real life!

Comparing with real wages is erroneous. One has to look at total employee compensation, instead. This includes:

1. worker pay

2. so-called employer's social security contribution

3. stock purchase plans

4. 401k company benefits

5. employer provided health care

6. retirement plan contributions

7. paid time off

8. other employee benefits

This adds usually around 40-60% of wages.

Another factor is the increasing share of the productivity is extracted through government taxation and deficit spending. Big government is expensive.

Now look at corporate profitability and CEO pay vs total paid per employee over the last 30 years.

Nonsense.

“Free trade” here refers to inter-country globalized trade across borders, not free markets within a confine.

There’s a much stronger case to be made that industrial policy has resulted in prosperity for Asia, ironically the opposite of free trade :)

Why do you think the Constitution instituted a free trade zone among the states?

No, there’s a class system for laser safety

The rating is for you to stick your eyes right up to it for a long period of time and still be fine

What’s “a Long time”? Does it cover a 2 hour commute in traffic with 20+ cars around you blasting it continuously any direction you look, invisibly?

Laser safety ratings are based on what would happen if the laser was pointed directly at your eye continuously. In the case of general traffic each lidar is scanning in different direction and while manufacturers try to make the energy produced by their lasers instantaneously brighter than the sun in one specific wavelength but damage to your retina is caused by excessive heating and doesn't care about what wavelength the energy is coming in at in the IR except to the extend that it can get to the retina or not. In your morning commute I'd worry less about the lidars than the much larger amount of invisible IR radiation given off by the sun. And I'd worry much less about the sun's IR radiation than the sun's UV radiation, wearing sunglasses during a 2 hour commute is best for your eyes.

The SNR for flash Lidar is really low because you spread the beam out over such a large area.

Most automotive Lidar already operate in a “photon starved regime”, ~200-300 photons per return[0]. If you spread that over the entire scene, your snr drops quickly.

This forces you into 1550nm, and a large detector array and high power laser at 1550nm is extremely expensive.

As for MEMS, it’s been a while but I think FOV/steering angle range , steering speed and even maximum beam power were concerns

EDIT: my Lidar friend Jake reminded me that the appetizer size is also an issue with MEMS- smaller aperture = less light collected = lower SNR

[0] https://www.hamamatsu.com/content/dam/hamamatsu-photonics/si...

> Most automotive Lidar already operate in a “photon starved regime”, ~200-300 photons per return[0]. If you spread that over the entire scene, your snr drops quickly.

Translating: Normally you have a large single sensor per laser, which makes measurements at a very high rate. With flash lidar, you split the sensor up like an image sensor. In a normal image sensor, each pixel can collect light for a long time, but if you do that with lidar you have no distance resolution. The sensor is sitting idle 99% of the time, and you pay in sensitivity and accuracy.

Array sensors, MEMs, and phased arrays all struggle because they're all really good at small-angle differences, while the reason for scanning lidar is large-angle differences. Maybe one day we'll start making curved dies and it'll be easier to have a really wide FOV without needing multiple sensors.

You can actually make curved dies already- there’s a company doing that for image sensors, if you thin silicon down it becomes flexible

I enjoy how people are dunking on this by saying “omg this is what happens when engineers dare to have thoughts on other topics” when this is very similar to the theory for CBT in psychology

Nah, nat gas is cheaper

The problem is that not all parts of the world have access to cheap nat gas

Is that with or without the external costs of additional CO2 releases?

> Is that with or without the external costs of additional CO2 releases?

Without. But on a global scale those externalities aren't priced in. Particularly at the margin.

Such external costs should only be included if the uncertainties on estimates of external costs of CO2 emissions are somehow represented. And I’m referring to factoring in all structural and parametric uncertainties inherent in climate models. Cutting to the chase, you can never factor in, or even meaningfully bound, those structural uncertainties. Not a big deal for million dollar investments, a big deal for trillion dollar investments.

Modelers of all ilks generally avoid reporting the underlying uncertainties in their results. And when they do report them, they are woefully underestimated. Fine in the abstract, but not acceptable when trillions of dollars are at stake. Dollars that can be spent instead on direct low risk, high impact improvements in third world child health (clean air, clean water, infectious diseases, etc.). Maybe choose those that also mitigate climate impacts (as we currently understand them), but directly save the living children/people first.

Keep on improving the models with scientific research, but don’t fool ourselves about the accuracy and completeness of such models for policy analysis. I’m old enough to remember the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth controversies.

The geophysics behind, say, the Santos Barrossa gas project appears pretty tight; the C02 emmissions estimates are directly tied to the economic feasibility estimate process .. if one is wrong then so is the other, if so it must be a bad investment and a foolish project?

    When the project’s offshore and gas processing emissions are factored in, the LNG produced from the Barossa field would have a total emissions intensity of 1.4 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of LNG produced.

    This makes the Barossa development the most emissions intensive LNG projects in Australia and the world

~ https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Santos-2022-Cli...

At this point in time there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the current 11 billion tonne of CO2 equivilant emmissions released annually .. an increase in trapped solar heat energy that directly leads to increased storm intensity, climbing global mean tempretures, and edging closer to positive feedback thresholds which are significantly hard to reverse when crossed.

There are new dielectric refrigerants that aren’t as polluting, but they’re more expensive

It’s expensive, not needed for most consumer workloads and ironically, is actually often worse for latency for many patterns, even though it’s much higher bandwidth

why is that ironic? Many ways to increase bandwidth come at the cost of latency...

GPT-4 could’ve written this article better- hey there’s an use case right there!