if you use gemini protocol, you probably know about it: bubble is a reddit like software. i know about two deployments, the original, by the author is at gemini://bbs.geminispace.org
Still doesn't really seem all that big. Some EVs have 100 KWh batteries. A container ship with the battery capacity of 500 cars doesn't sound like much.
Until you realize that the energy requirement is also different. Land transport in general is very inefficient. Ship is in fact one of the most energy efficient means of transport.
Size wise, it is small relative to the ship size. Look at car engine. How many % of volume is taken up for the engine and fuel tank of car? I think it is close to 30-40%
194 nautical miles isn't terribly far, though. For port to port, sure. For oceanic shipping, I don't think 194 is going to cut it. I think we will probably have to do SMRs or efuels to really cut cargo ship and cruise ship emissions when crossing the Pacific or Atlantic. Though I don't know where nuclear powered shipping (in non-military applications) is in terms of progress.
I do think that cargo ships are the one vehicle where solar panels would make sense though. Add that and a sail, and you should be able to increase the range considerably.
Yep, and the Chevy Silverado EV manages 200kWh now. This cargo ship better be small and efficient because 250 American pickup trucks worth of battery really isn't much.
It's still not a lot of energy though. Some rough napkin math for how far this would get you is below:
Typical medium size cargo ships in the Panama Canal travel around 25 knots burning 63000 gallons per day of fuel with 5000TEU of cargo. That's roughly 600mi/63000gal or 1142miles per ton gallon. That Silverado EV somehow weighs 4 tons (totally safe to be driving at highway speeds), so this is the equivalent of roughly 285.5mpg per Silverado. The Silverado is 67mpge on its own, so the ship is just over 4x as efficient (and slower which is ignored here but would impact the vehicle efficiency).
So using the Silverado's 450 mile optimal range we can say it has at most an optimistic 7 gallons equivalent fuel in its 200kWh battery. 50 MWH would be enough for a theoretical 1750 gallons equivalent if efficiency were the same. But for the efficiency difference this corresponds to a 4.2x improvement to 7350 gallons equivalent. Therefore this is enough to run that typical ship above for 2.8 hours. So with 65000 tons of cargo in the above ship to do a 200 mile route this ship would need roughly 3x as large a battery. More likely it will just carry ~1/3 the cargo or have charging stops en-route.
The 19.4km/h top speed of this ship suggests they're well aware of the extremely limited range this will have for its size and it sounds like the Shanghai to Nanjing route will be pushing it's limits despite being less than 200 miles.
True but efficiency is not the same and not as simple to compare since we don't know how much of the ship's battery is converted into motion. Similarly we don't directly know it's mass. ICE cars can use ~20% of the energy in fuel while EVs 90%+ of the energy in a battery. But now much can that ship effectively use? I have no idea how efficient boats are or aren't, hence the roundabout method above.
Using standard container sizes as battery modules is kind of genius. That way they can be swapped out when they get older and newer technology comes along, they could even be swapped between ships.
These batteries are likely far more complex in packaging, design, and thermal management that any consumer electronic cell. They'll likely "fail safely" if/when they do fail.
China is a massive economy and country with some of the most advanced manufacturering and tooling in the entire world. Yes, it could be shoddy, but it's in a ship and is going to be far more regoriously scrutinized by their regulatory bodies than a normal stationary battery would be. I understand the plausiblity of your comment, but it seems to be rooted in prejudice or extreme ignorance.
Are you kidding me? iPhones and most smartphones and laptops are Chinese products. The vast majority of high speed rail in the world are Chinese products. The Tiangong space station is largely Chinese products.
Why not an electric train? There is contiguous land between the two cities, and then you don't have to carry your fuel with you or build giant batteries out of rare earth minerals, while risking run-away shorts that will surely endanger everyone on board, and ensure the cargo is lost.
If sails were that great we would still be using them for freight, we didn't switch to petroleum for the fun of it. Environmental issues put aside it's a pretty great source of energy.
For achieving maximum speed, sure. To simply guarantee you get there? Not at all - the Iberians knew how to navigate solely on maritime currents 500 years ago.
If sails were that great we would still be using them for freight, we didn’t switch to petroleum for the fun of it.
We started using pretroleum because capitalism requires infinite growth as fast as you can muster it. Particularly with modern refrigeration techniques and automation, time insensitive navigation for transport could easily be done with sails.
Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it'll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.
This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.
All in all I'd guess the advantages are roughly:
Reduced staff
reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
simpler logistics (loading / unloading)
Disadvantages:
Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)
I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you've designed a container that is a large battery, you've already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you've built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.
Dude awesome. I mean you gotta hand it to them. Killing it with affordable electric cars, solar panels and now this. It’s a step in the right direction, and that’s more than you could say about UK
That’s not so true nowadays. Skilled factory workers already make a good salary in China nowadays. Like better than any other “global south” country at least. And by cost of living, better than the US probably tbh.
To be fair, most of their technological advances come through intellectual property theft from companies from other countries that did the design and problem solving leg work and were dumb enough to exploit cheap Chinese labor. China could then easily copy their products. The workmanship and safety/quality of a Chinese product should be highly scrutinized.
I care little about that at this point to be honest with you ...
The alternative is that these innovating companies would have milked the IP and/or shelved it if it means more money, fuck the people, fuck the environment, etc etc etc
If China's IP theft brings the green revolution we knew we needed 50 years ago but the innovators sabotaged for profit, I'd consider China the robin Hood of the story
The "Chinese steal everything and are expert copy-cats" is an orientalist trope with a few hundred years of history. White supremacists are still repeating it to this day, and in this thread.
As other people have said, it doesn't really matter as long as it helps solve climate change. Boo hoo, western corporations didn't get to overcharge for stuff, big deal.
We're putting in tones of wind power. The problem is the weird linking of electricity prices to gas prices and the fact we don't have anywhere near the energy storage capacity we need. So we end up paying wind farm operators to shut down turbines and generate less when its extra windy.
Batteries and salt water mix poorly, so I’m concerned about that aspect for crew safety. I would actually be glad if they limited battery size, hoping to augment with solar, to reduce that hazzard.
To do that they need to make sure they have adequate funding and make sure they don't incur some huge financial liabilities somehow. The Internet Archive failed at that last part when they decided to lend out ebooks that are under copyright without many limits (and potentially with their Great 78 Project regarding music as well).
I wrote that then deleted it cause I wasn’t sure how you address it internationally. Where PBS is broadcast in the USA, the internet is open to the world.
But, you’re right! It should be publicly funded. I’d have no problem with my tax dollars going towards that.
True, I don't know how this would work for international stuff, but this is human knowledge and history, it's something we should be archiving and not tossing to the wind.
Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.
IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.
Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they're on about.
"Fuck you, I'm doing library stuff." should be a valid legal defense.
You should probably read the article. The case is only about how the Archive did more than just library stuff—they made a ton of copies and gave them out for free, then argued that the cost of maintenance somehow made that act legal.
Internet archive turned themselves into an ebook piracy site rather than a digital library. They distributed unlimited copies of books for free. And then Internet Archive defended it with something in the lines of:
It costs a lot of money to make, and distribute, digital copies of books without the permission of the copyright holder... therefore it should be legal for The Internet Archive to do it.
That's a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.
The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.
Internet Archive's other projects like the Wayback Machine may be good but how they handled their digital lending of books during the pandemic was not. They removed the limit on the number of people that can borrow a book at a time, thus taking away any resemblance to traditional physical lending. You can argue that copyright laws are bad and should be changed (and I'd agree) but that doesn't change the facts of what happened under the current law.
I've never seen someone self-report a failure of Amerikan History like this before. You must've missed THE ENTIRE Civil Rights Movement segment, or just tuned it out because it made you or someone close to you uncomfy to think about-- like I've asked another person in this thread, what the fuck do you think CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE means????
Laws can very well be wrong, in a moral sense, and quite a few of them still in existence today are, but trying to argue that in court is usually a bad idea.
They should. But you can't exactly be surprised if you get in trouble because you broke the law, no matter how stupid you think that law is.
I think it's stupid that you can't always turn right on a red light. Plenty of people would agree. I'll get a ticket if I do it anyway, and it'll be my own fault.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
This is just wrong.
If a library has purchased two copies of a piece of digital media - an ebook, for example - which patrons can check out online, only two people can have it checked out at once, and when the checkout period expires, the content is no longer available to the patron. Now a copy is freed up for the next person to check out.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
If the law doesn't maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
No carve out is needed, because DRM allows libraries to stay within the bounds of their license agreements. The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
There's an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
While I agree with the idea, the internet archive isn’t a library. It was masquerading as a library to try and avoid lawsuits, but did a piss-poor job of it because they flew in the face of the licensing agreements and copyright laws that legal libraries are bound by.
I love the Internet Archive as a resource. I use it once or twice a week. But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea. They painted a giant legal target on their backs, and now they’re pitching a fit because the book publishers called them on it.
The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
It's worse than that. They did use "Controlled Digital Lending" to limit the number of people who can access a book at one time to something resembling the number of physical books that they had. And then they turned that restriction off because of the pandemic. There is no pandemic exception to copyright laws, even if that would make sense from a public health perspective to prevent people from having unnecessary contact at libraries. They screwed themselves and I can only hope that the Wayback Machine archives get a home somewhere else if they do go under.
But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea.
That's a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming 'everyone' agrees, will rarely ever be correct.
You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.
the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing "intellectual property" is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There's really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find a compelling legal reason why it isn't.
Loads of people don't consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I'm very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing. Just another branch of the habitually pocket-ran and stolen-from finally adopting that stance, from where I sit.
Expanding piracy, a pretty brutal form of robbery, to include ignoring digital media copyrights only really makes sense if you're trying to vilify nonviolent criminals. I haven't heard good arguments for more than 5-10 year copyrights.
And, you'd want/need redundancy. One on-site back up for quick restoration and one off-site for surviving physical disaster. So, you'd need at least 3 times that. In HDD prices, that is roughly 2.5 million per set-up, or 7.5 million total for all three. And in SSD prices, well it's about 3x that. 7.5 million per set up and 22.5million for all three.
An alternate option is a distributed back-up. They could have people volunteer to store and host like 10 gigs each, and just hand out each 10 gig chunk to 10 different people. That would take alot of work to set up, but it would be alot safer. And there are already programs/systems like that to model after. 10 gigs is just an example, might be more successful or even more possible in chunks of 1-2 terabytes. Basically one full hard drive per volunteer.
Lol, had to add that after doing the math for 10 gigs to ten people and realising that was 1000 people per terabyte, so would take 150 million volunteers. Even at 2 petabytes each, assuming we still wanted 10x redundancy in that model, it would be like 750 thousand volunteers or something like that. Maybe there is no sustainable volunteer driven model, lol.
That click bait title makes it seem like the Internet Archive itself will come crumbling down. Now that I skimmed read the article, it just seems like they are going to lose the court battle for this case. Maybe some other stuff, but I get to keep my MS-DOS abandonware downloads.
They’re facing hundreds of millions in punitive damages. Fragments of their servers will be in trophy cases in copyright enforcement agencies’ lobbies.
Sounds like this would at the very least remove $20-30m in revenue (according to the article) not counting if the copyright holders decide to go after them.
I think it puts them in a precarious situation overall.
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