Money.

Now that USB-C is the required cable, people can go out and buy any cheap cable they want. The law turned a proprietary cash cow into a low return commodity item.

Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.

Now, about those materials used to construct solar panels…

Raw material is usually a small fraction of the cost of refueling. I would also argue that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a small blip in the lifetime of a reactor, ~80 years. Transient pricing will have a negligible effect on the LCOE.

This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.

Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf

When we couldn’t share a family password anymore we just didn’t sign up for our own account. Easy as that. Been watching a ton more Hulu as a result. Netflix isn’t worth more than a one-month sub/year.

They’re blinded by dollar signs that won’t come to fruition. Complete brain dead move on their part.

New ways of cooling data servers and batteries for EVs. Rather than typical air or water/glycol cooling we’re immersing the components in a dielectric fluid. It’s an interesting space as both the hardware and fluids are being developed simultaneously. The company I work for is developing the fluid.

About 90% of the fluids out there are just oils taken directly from a refinery and repackaged under different names with a ton of marketing. Yet, end consumers don’t really understand the technical details of the the fluids so they tend to fall for whoever has nice marketing. We’re out to change that and show that the chemistry we add improves the performance and durability of the fluid. So half the job is engineering and the other half is educating customers.

A lot of the NOVEC line is/was manufactured in Belgium. That plant was shut down for several months because high levels of PFAS was found in the surrounding area.

They cleaned it up and restarted the plant, only to announce they’re exiting the business by 2025.

I agree that the regulatory issue was their main motivator for shutting down PFAS manufacturing. Their plants (like Belgium) probably require significant maintenance and improvements, meaning millions in CAPEX. Money they probably don’t want to spend on products that will be globally banned within the decade.

3M announced they were exiting this space, rightfully so and probably a decade late. But I’ve heard rumblings in the industry that the US Govt might require them to continue to produce these awful materials as they are used in defense-related applications. Hope that’s not the case and we can shutdown all other producers (Chemours/DuPont etc) as well.

Same here. So far so good.

Not as much activity as Reddit obviously, but I’m embracing it by seeking out the more active communities. I definitely fell into a rut on Reddit by only sticking to a handful of subs. This transition is forcing me to develop new interests, it’s great!