Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.

Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.

That’s unlikely to change for long distance flights.

For short flights small electric planes are becoming viable already, and they will continue towards medium flights over time.

But theres no serious concepts for a battery that could compete for long flights.

That’s not to say that planes are doomed to be fossil dependent forever. But the likely solution will be a renewable high density fuel, possibly hydrogen or something easier to carry.

It’ll be less efficient than batteries on a energy in to work out basis, but once the cost of carrying the weight is considered, that will always swing way in the favour of high density fuels regardless of battery efficiency (for long distance).

The answer is dependent on context I think.

In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.

The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.

In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.

The EFF is probably competitive there. But clearly they’re both on the same side of most issues, so not really a competition.

Ah, a nuanced opinion. That’s just too much for some people to process. I’m sorry you went through that. Bad enough that they couldn’t accept the difference of opinion, but finding the most painful way to claw at your soul stinks of cruelty to me, perhaps you’re lucky they showed their true colours on day one.