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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • to run drug tests you need six figure range machine (when new), maybe 5 euro worth of plastic (spe column, eppendorfs, pipette tips), couple ml of acetonitrile and maybe 5-7 min of machine time on average. it can run 24/7 and if you find anything you can do more detailed analysis. bro’s not earning shit, he’s paying down the machines (and maintenance)

    e: no way i’m nerd-sniped this easily. you can get hplc-ms for 90ish grand, add milliq water purification system, solvent recycling system, lots of fridges, a couple of laptops and company server and various other equipment and we’re probably in 200k range, excluding lab building itself. then you’ll need, say, $5 of consumables per sample ($2 per spe cartridge), so we’re talking about $40 revenue minus material costs. wages: you’ll need something about four people to run this thing at full tilt, two lab workers, one (?) clerk, half time driver and half time it guy, if you pay everyone 15k/mo then you need to go through 100ish samples just to pay wages not counting rent utilities and debts. but you can probably run 200 per day per machine, 300 if pushing it, so the main constraint will be logistics. because most of lab is in place then adding another hplc/ms will be only 90k. 300 samples per day print 9k per day, if you can get these samples. that’s probably why he’s expanding



  • it’s a flow battery, so it keeps charge basically indefinitely (when not in use energy-bearing parts are separated). you can run it as hard as you need and it will not degrade in use-dependent way, at least not as hard as lead or lithium batteries

    to elaborate on durability, there’s no capacity loss with these batteries. so if design intention is to run these batteries from full to empty and back every day, and maybe a bit more* they can handle it no problem, because everything that happens, happens in liquid phase that can’t degrade. lithium battery will degrade fast with such usage, but this one won’t. on balance, there’s need for pump and electrolyser maintenance, but at least you won’t need to rip apart everything and replace all batteries every 3 years. per kwh per year of use it might be cheaper this way

    * they might want this battery to provide energy in the morning, before solar panels kick in, soak up excess energy from noon peak, then discharge it in the evening. that might be 500ish cycles per year, and they can run it at full tilt







  • people see strait closed and think of oil because of course there’s a lot of oil going through it, but oil can be routed through pipelines outside gulf so impact on oil is less than that 20% commonly cited

    the bigger impact is on gas, because it can’t be transported that easily and it’s closer to 40% of supply. because gas is so hard to transport you can try to avoid doing that, so it’s turned into fertilizer and diesel and aluminum, whose transport is easier, and isn’t as constrained as LNG transport. byproduct of gas mining is helium and it can’t be mined on its own, and while valuable enough to be flown out of qatar supply stops when gas stops. gulf royals have seen that world tries to get rid of oil, so this energy intensive manufacture was intended as a sort of hedge or insurance, but this too stops without transport

    so, yeah. things that can be expected to directly get more expensive are energy in general and gas in particular, plastics of all kinds, aluminum, nitrogen fertilizer and to some degree phosphorus fertilizer (uses sulfur as input). and everything that depends on them, which is broadly everything. the only winning move is not to play ie use renewables for energy. these chinese officials who backed renewables buildout are probably the most vindicated people in hemisphere

    that said, you can make fertilizer from other fuels, and in other places too, so it’s likely that it will “just” get more expensive, and lower nitrogen use might work about as well because many farmers overapply it. if you are a westerner i guess you might not see it hitting you too hard, but in places like sudan that will be a problem