There is no irony there, both statements are equally supported: not at all.

I have an argument for my credence but it’s typed above.

A ball dropped near the earth's surface will always fall towards the centre of the earth at ~9.81m/s^2 no matter what it has done previously.

A chunk of iron put into a 1μT magnetic field will behave differently depending on what other magnetic fields it has been in recently.

> A ball dropped near the earth's surface will always fall towards the centre of the earth

How exactly does this address "whether it was recently thrown upward or dropped from above"?

A ball in a given location will do something unpredictable if you have no information about its past. Is that hysteresis?

If it was recently thrown upward, it is either still travelling upwards away from the centre of the Earth, or it is falling downwards towards the centre of the Earth.

So its past is kind of irrelevant. At some point if nothing is supporting it, it will fall towards the centre of the Earth.

This is just high school physics.

You don’t need information about its past. Everything you need to know to predict its future state is contained in its current position and velocity at the moment you measure it.

Is there no measurable quantity in the current state of a magnetized ball that would predict its behavior in a magnetic field then?

I'd be surprised if that were the case: seems like it'd violate some sort of "locality", where the future should depend entirely on the present state.

Is it just that there's unidentified present state that's perhaps more easily characterized by knowing the history? Or is it somehow unidentifiable in principle?

Yeah, the current magnetization of the sphere carries all the history of the magnetic fields it's been in in its value.

The hysteresis in the material only means that if you apply 1T to it to magnetise (supposing the ball starts with zero magnetisation) it and then apply 0T to demagnetise it, the remanent field in the ball would be like 0.4T due to hystetesis, you need to apply something like -0.4T to leave it as it started.

Thank you! That makes sense to me.

So you think diplomats are executed to send a message, there is just the appearance of them not being?

Again, what is meant by a rule based order is not that there are solid rules upheld consistently as in criminal law, just that there are norms which are usually obeyed.

Notably, Shakespeare lived in a time before copyright and famously ripped off plots from his contempories. I dont think he's a great reference for the argument that there would be no writing about the modern world if you removed copyright.

You could even pick a highly compound number like 2^3*3^2*5 then you could divide it neatly into whole numbers for lots of divisors!

A month is probably excessive, but there are large regions of the world where its not uncommon for both solar and wind power to be running at <5% for multiple weeks in a row.

There's an engineering tradeoff between having excess generation capacity, for that seasonal minimum, and having more storage. The cost optimal decision on that tradeoff will be determined by the ratio of excess generation cost and storage cost for rarely-used storage.

Until that ratio falls by at least 3x to 5x in favor of batteries being cheaper than generation, extra generation is going to be the way that grids actually get built out. Batteries and generation are both falling in cost fairly quickly, but generation still has the overall edge in learning rate. Cost decreases won't bottom out for at least a decade, because there's been no slow down yet, so I wouldn't expect this ratio to change for a minimum of 20 years, which means that pretty much a full energy system interchange will have happened by the time that this price ration changes.

So there's at least a few assumptions about the current industry and it's future development that underlie my assertion that a month of storage makes no sense, but I'm confident enough that I'd place money on the bet, and there's very very few things I'd bet on.

Edit: one thing that would break my assumption is the industrial development of storage that's super cheap for once-per-year usage. Most storage now needs to be cycled about 300x per year to make economic sense. "Long duration" storage is actually better defined as "economical storage at few battery cycles per year". There's nothing like that in the research hopper, but that doesn't mean it couldn't appear tomorrow and be deployed within a decade. Something that only gets used once or twice a year has to be dirt cheap, even if you could get 10x or 20x normal electricity prices for it.

Seems great, a keyboard shortcut for reading any text is nice and frictionless. I'd love to see a Linux version.

Of what use is an encyclopedia with "trash quality"?

Ok, suppose you have a "trash/low quality" article and "this article has been deleted", the article with some info will win over the audience as they search for it. Like "Worse is Better", the quality will improve over time and the "deleted article" will stay at 0 recognition. An average internet user will not complain about the Wikipedia article, they just switch to Grokipedia and whatever AI-generated content it has, since they now have it.

No it isn't. Storage capacity for energy is expensive, if you want to have a grid that is largely dependent on intermittent sources and still have a stable grid providing power at all times you need large amounts of storage as well as generating capacity.

For example if nuclear costs 1bn for a GW and solar+wind costs 0.6bn but you need to also install 0.5bn of storage to make the grid reliable to the safety margin you deem acceptable then it is no longer a cheaper system.

Amount of storage needed scales up rapidly as you get towards an grid with entirely intermittent generation.

It's more like 1 billion per GW versus 300 million per GW including the batteries. I'm sorry, it's just not close.