Echo Dot

I don’t buy a new phone more often than probably one every five or six, so I don’t really mind buying an expensive flagship.

The problem tends to be though that people buy an expensive phone and then later have financial difficulties. And people criticise them for having an expensive phone as if they could have known that that would be an issue a year or so down the line.

We’ll have to wait and see what they’re availability is like and if they offer bulk ordering but I’d be very interested to use these as our work phones. Currently we use iPhones and I’ve never been happy with that decision.

Probably a purist complaining it’s not the fabled mythical Linux phone.

It literally has every feature of a modern smartphone. And it’s not even that expensive.

If I had a need for a new phone right now I’d be buying this.

What are you using right now because every Linux phone I’ve ever seen has been an unfinished working program that isn’t commercially ready.

It has a headphone jack? They must lack courage.

Have you tried being rich? I highly recommend it.

That’s the problem in the UK, it only really heavily snows one year in five so it isn’t profitable or economical to really invest in things like snow tires and snow ploughs, so whenever there is significant snow it does kind of cause everything to grind or halt. The alternative is to buy a bunch of snow equipment that needs constant maintenance throughout a winter where it doesn’t get below 3°C, and nothing more exciting than a lot of rain happens.

It’s always a bit stupid when people compare weather like this.

They basically go “I live in the high Arctic and frequently enjoy temperatures of -40°C”, so all those people complaining about snow in Hawaii are overreacting.

It’s like they don’t listen to the thing they’re saying.

That’s terrible. Use the nide grabber and put that right. Wobbling all over the place right now.

It took about a century to get decent electric cars so I stand by my statement. It may no longer be true in the 22nd century, but there are fundamental issues with this technology that have not been addressed. I can’t imagine where likely to see solutions anytime soon, mostly because I don’t think there are solutions, I just don’t think the technology works.

Pressure change refrigeration is just so much more efficient. The light on your refrigerator consumes more energy than the refrigeration process, so it’s not like there’s even a massive impetus to make the system even more efficient because it barely uses energy as it is.

Where this technology might come in handy is where size is a severely limiting factor. Such as on satellites or small drones.

No one’s saying the technology isn’t interesting just at the article is rubbish.

Who wrote that headline anyway, the headline should have been scientists have created sub-zero solid state cooling, but the writer somewhat arbitrarily decided that this was about environmentalism which this has got nothing to do with.

The scientists are not even making the claim that this is a necessarily viable technology, it’s just a thing that they’ve managed to achieve.

I’m surprised the article writer didn’t do the usual thing that science “journalists” tend to do, which is claim that it kills cancer. So we should be thankful for small mercies.

What through a wormhole?

There’s a lot of air between the refrigerator and space I think it might get in the way

I’m asking what saurce you have that says that they are more efficient than refrigeration systems because everything I find says the opposite.

Refrigeration already is cheap. The problem a lot of places have is not an inability to afford a refrigerator it’s no energy to power the refrigerator. This technology does not into address that problem. In fact it probably worsens it because this technology is less efficient in terms of power consumption.

Also I would love to live in the world where you live because over here food costs money. It isn’t free.

That’s reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.

That’s also impossible. Anything that does work generates heat, it’s a fundamental law of thermodynamics.

There is no such thing as a thermally neutral mechanism, because all energy is eventually thermal. You can reflect heat, as in you can prevent heat from being added into a system via thermally neutral mechanisms but you can’t remove it without exerting energy.

What sources?

The article doesn’t list any. All it says is they reached a cooling temperature of -12°C, but has no information on the energy used to achieve that.

They are not new technology the idea has been around since at least the 1980s. There is a reason we don’t use them and it’s because they are mechanically complicated and inefficient. Those in terms of power use and maintenance requirements.

However with the move to renewable energy maybe that efficiency limitation isn’t as much of a problem as it used to be. Especially if it means you can get away from toxic compounds.

Although I have never seen a commercial grade implementation of the technology. It’s always just been demos that don’t really achieve enough cooling to be anything other than a curiosity.

I don’t think shape change materials are all that efficient. The problem being is you still need some mechanism to compress the material again, which obviously uses energy. As you say their main advantage is that they don’t use traditional refrigerants. But the trade-off for that is that they are mechanically more complicated and probably for any given amount of cooling will require more electricity.

You can trade those off with renewable energy sources of course so it may still be worth it but technically they are worse efficiency than traditional vacuum pumps.