Notices by Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖ (christineburns@mastodon.green)

@Soupdragon @Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 @John_Loader Those were the days — in the sixties for me. Thirty kids sat on stools round a bowl of water with no protection while the chemistry teacher cut slices of metallic sodium and lithium and dropped them in. Fortunately the school was not allowed Caesium.

@ChrisMayLA6 I can’t see anyone succeeding from scratch in a market where the entry cost is so high and the unit price keeps falling. Chinese manufacturers like CATL and BYD are on course to get the price of a kilowatt hour of batteries down to around $50 and the lead time into volume production for anyone else is such that by the time you get numbers up you’ve been beaten on price. The early mover advantage is locked in.

@Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 possibly, but any strategy to build competitive Sodium ion batteries needs to simultaneously establish a local supply chain for the cathode and anode minerals and (since the batteries have lower storage density) a whole range of downstream applications to keep the factory supplied with volume customers. I think politicians fall into trap of thinking about the cell factory in isolation.

@Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 I don’t know. Buying the machines that spread mixtures of minerals on metal foils and stuff the result in a can or pouch is the easy part. We could buy our way into ASSEMBLING batteries. But I don’t know where we’d get the raw materials because China has inserted itself into key parts of the supply chains. I don’t think we’ve got a true strategy for using what we make in stuff people buy, aside from some vague notion that it goes in cars.

@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 This is where you have to admire the vertical integration of Tesla. They’re building a plant to process the stuff that comes out of the ground from territory they bought in the US. They’ve built a plant to process the Lithium Hydroxide that comes from that plant and turn it into battery cathode material. They’ve built the plant to roll batteries from that material and make them straight into packs that they’ve built markets for. But more than that..

@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 ..they’ve innovated at each step so their batteries aren’t just the same as everyone else makes. They’ve gone well beyond trying to make a commodity product and the vertical integration means they have margin control because very little of what they spend goes to third parties as profits. Granted they also work with partners to get the volumes up but I liken this to the days when car manufacturers made key elements of the product. Ford had a giant..

@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 ..foundry in Dagenham casting engine blocks and my grandma sewed together the seat covers. I see none of that integrated vision in the way our politicians look at building battery assembly plants.

@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 @John_Loader You can also refine Lithium salts out of seawater. Lithium was the first metal element to be made in the Big Bang and in the process of star decay, which is why there is so much of it about. Lithium mines are only sporadic because there wasn’t the demand until recently. It was thrown away in mining for other minerals in greater demand. That said, I’m not sure our geology supports mining widely.

Co-author of the ActivityPub protocol (the thing that makes Mastodon work) gets ActivityPub explained to her in viral response.

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113483100191170865

@ChrisMayLA6 This is exactly what people were saying in 2016: “Relax, he’ll pivot to being a statesman”, they said. They were wrong. Trump turned out to be exactly what he’d shown himself to be on the campaign trail. But it’s not now Trump we need to worry about. He’ll be invalided out with dementia some time after the inauguration. President Vance will then step up to competently implement Project 2025 for Peter Thiel and the other billionaires.

All done! Today’s switch from copper to fibre took roughly an hour and my internet was down for just the time it took to move the routers to their new home.

How Janey Godley became one of the most iconic transphobe-fighters of a generation

https://metro-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/metro.co.uk/2024/11/02/janey-godley-became-one-iconic-transphobe-fighters-a-generation-21633345/amp/

I’ve just been reminded of this occasion on 6th July 2005, leading the Pride London March down Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner. With me were Michael Cashman (not yet a Lord), Lord Chris Smith and Wayne Sleep among others. Stephen Fry is just behind Michael Cashman’s head. It was still a time when some Lesbians and Gay men were uncomfortable about giving space like this to trans people. One of the organisers had gone out on a limb though to get me there and plonk me among queer royalty

@grayface_ghost @goatsarah Will you be leaving her out on the hard stuff until next year now?

If you can't understand why your trans friend is scared right now, then you don't have a trans friend; you know a trans person. FREEDHEARTS.ORG

Spotted in the local park this afternoon.

@alexadeswift Most shops have opened on Sundays since the laws on Sunday trading were changed over 30 years ago. The superstore operates limited hours (not opening till 11am) but smaller food shops have always opened even when they couldn’t sell some of the things on display prior to the change in the law.

If you wonder why Britain has such high standard electricity tariffs when we so often have 50% wind + solar then this video essay seems to be an excellent introduction to the problems of marginal pricing. It’s not the whole story because retail suppliers also hedge with advance power purchase agreements with generators (bypassing the market) but it explains a great deal.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo&si=MdUFPJABt4YE5J6M

@picardtips …And do it in under an hour.

Something that was a small mid Atlantic proto-depression a couple of days ago has been spun into a hoolie by the jet stream and lobbed at the north west tonight, meaning a considerable abundance of renewable electricity tomorrow. Looks like I’ll be busy all day working out how to make the best of virtually free electricity. https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard