I should get around to posting about some washing machine repair I did…
What are you using it for and what’s the power budget? I have an absurdly overkill (and power hungry) older dual Xeon I got, and while it does a nice job of Boinc, it’s short on cache for a lot of the memory heavy tasks and sleep is utterly worthless - it “sleeps” at something stupid like 100W, so I have to shut it down nightly, which prevents running some other tasks I like running that don’t tolerate regular interruptions. I’m considering building more of the Broadwell/eDRAM boxes for compute to replace this one. I’ll try to dig up specs on it and PM the your way tomorrow.
Something that can do 128GB of RAM and an NVMe about a TB would be fine - I don’t need the redundancy that this server board is giving me, and low power would be nice.
A 10GBe Mac mini would fit the bill if a bit pricey.
We should start a new thread for computer/server/low-power questions.
Ok, you definitely do not want this box then. It’s an exceptional heater. Out in my office, I don’t care, but it’s about the furthest thing from a low power server you can find.
Well, on the counterpoint, John Kerry has argued that it won’t be a problem.
Anyway, no cause for concern, we literally don’t have the technologies needed, but, to use the standard thought ending cliche I hear so much in this realm, I’m sure they’ll think of something!
Reading this one way, yes, he’s saying what you’re saying: we don’t have the wherewithal to use the reductions we’ve already achieved to reduce things rather than increase production. Reading it another, there’s absolutely nothing that guarantees or promises us a solution from new technologies at all. We’re quite far along the curve of efficiency, materials and energy-wise, and our new tech at this point brings increasing tradeoffs in other areas or externalizes the supposed gains in the production chain, etc. I doubt we’ll see anything like a meaningful breakthrough via tech alone - and if we do, as you so cleverly noted, Jevon’s paradox will likely apply, meaning we’ll eat more cows rather than accept the reduction.
I see absolutely no way we reduce our emissions voluntarily, at all. If we do, it’ll be because of crises, resource shortages, and hostile interventions of various kinds as the resource wars start to heat up.
And this is roughly the same as saying, “Carbon reductions won’t happen until the increasing headwinds from climate/resources/etc literally force the economy to its knees and threaten to shoot it.”
A thumping good recession will reduce emissions quite effectively.
But to pin 50% of reductions on “future tech” and ignore Jevons… that’s just pure hopium.
Pretty much agree there. Adaptation, not mitigation, is going to be the smart strategy. Some part of adaptation may mitigate carbon, but that won’t be the primary purpose.
At the current rate of increase including immigration, US population would grow over the next century to 224% of its present value. Cutting waste/person by 55% would result in a net zero increase in total waste. There is so much single-use trash used for mail ordering, shopping bags, etc., I would wager that we could cut waste by far more than 55%.
I was trying to figure out how we can trim our waste by 55%, and then decided to look up what the actual US average is… and wow.
Apparently it’s around 5 lb/person/day, or on the order of 7000 lb/yr for a family of four. I don’t feel quite so bad about our 600 lb/yr to the dump (trending down) and probably a similar amount in recycling…
Cancel trash service and the problem gets solved quickly…
We don’t have trash service either, though the town offers dumpsters 1/2mi from our house. It does make it harder to just throw things away, as I have to hook up the trailer and take our trash bin to the dumpster every time it fills up. Oddly the one curb-side collection waste stream we have is compost, which is a private service we also get finished compost from. I’d have set up a compost bin if I’d expected to be in this house long enough to make it worthwhile. Recycling is a haul to the next town over (which I can do on other trips in my EV). Simple burnables (paper, cardboard) go up the wood-stove chimney in winter and reduce our natural gas burn by some token amount and my trash haul appreciably.
Having to take each pound of waste where it needs to go does certainly drive awareness of what we produce, though we haven’t cut our waste production as much as I’d like.
Given how well we adapted to Amazon I don’t think people would have a problem shipping waste back via UPS - it is instructive to see how much we produce, and what much of it is. So much packaging - and 90% of our recycling by bulk is cardboard.
But at some point the Elephant has to be faced and eaten - and that is that we’ve outsourced most of our pollution to China and India and other places, where we can pretend it doesn’t occur. And even if the US goes net negative on carbon somehow it won’t be enough.
I’ve considered trying to make “paper bricks” for a wood stove, I just… lack a wood stove. We have plenty of paper that goes to recycling I could shred, soak, and compress into bricks - they apparently make decent enough fuel, though I understand they burn a good bit hotter than wood which could be a concern for some chimneys if they’re not well cleaned.
I’ve also considered making some air augmented burn barrels - radial air inlets part way up the side, and a good spark arrestor/debris catcher at the top. Just something to really get waste burned cleanly and not light the hill on fire. But I wouldn’t be able to use it for a lot of the year, and I don’t trust it to get hot enough to deal with a lot of the more hazardous stuff (plastics, mostly). More likely to build a rocket mass burner or two as a starting system for a charcoal barrel.
Back when I was into biodiesel, I heard of people doing something similar for waste glycerin. They’d mix it with sawdust to make a paste and pack it into burnable containers like paper milk cartons. If you had a waste stream or something burnable but liquid (bacon grease, waste cooking oil?), you could do something similar. I am not sure the juice would be worth the squeeze on paper logs made with water, they seem like they’d take ages to dry except in summer.
How about an outdoor wood-burning furnace? I think you can toss just about anything in those. You could fill it up with a fresh batch of compressed cardboard to get water temperature up when needed.