Undercooking turkey isn't an ethics lapse, it's a mistake, & we're not worried AI will propagate mistakes by board members.

Larry instead showed his ethics are deeply flawed, & being on the board, he'll be involved in ethical decisions guiding OpenAI that can well have repercussions in classrooms.

But as everyone is pointing out, careful broad-spectrum analysis to ensure nothing remains in the distillate is important with so many unknowns and proprietary chemical mixes, so I'd trust NM's more careful approach a bit more than TX moving ahead before all the results are in.

NM has been pretty careful and hasn't approved use of the "cleaned" water quite yet, but there are publications of results of toxicity and ag use tests from places like NMSU that show results heading in the right direction. For example: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Raw produced water would absolutely be toxic, but they are at least talking about the clean stream after processing. New Mexico has been working on piloting & proving approaches, with researchers at places like NMSU testing toxicity and the NM Environmental Department reviewing results for safety.

There's further untargeted analysis to be done (e.g. examining the water with mass spectrometry to identify any other unknown materials that may be present), but New Mexico has been taking a pretty sound approach to finding & validating safe treatment methods before approving re-use.

As for TX... 🤷‍♂️

Tarazona et al. just last year published some results using a thermal distillation process followed by polishing with zeolite & granular activated carbon that passed significant whole effluent toxicity (WET) tests with zebrafish embryos developing as well as a control group.

doi.org/10.1016/j.jh...

This is an active field of research. Approaches often include pre-treatment to remove suspended solids / oils, desalination to concentrate dissolved solids into a brine for disposal & liberating distilled water, which then still contains volatiles (organics, ammonia) that need to be polished off.

How it's used matters too though. Releasing it for plant growth mainly results in loss to atmosphere, but other applications use it as a reactant in chemical processes. In that case (if the end product isn't a fuel), the CO2 is not released to the atmosphere, so could be considered a better end-use.

That's a good question with a few answers. A lot of commercial CO2 is a byproduct of ethanol production or fuel refining processes, so is generally going to be released anyway, and some comes from geologic formations of trapped CO2 underground, so is "new".

It's actually fairly common practice for many indoor plant grow ops.

We once analyzed using renewable heat in place of a fired heater for a hot-house tomato facility. Found that without their combustion exhaust, they'd have to buy CO2 to get the same growing conditions, negating the carbon savings.

Hah, I wouldn't say 'hate' towards "in order to", I had just been given a mission to cut length, and since I couldn't find big cuts obvious to me, the small cuts became the thing to do! 😇

Not even city engineers, as this took place far away in the San Joaquin valley in rural reservoirs who provide absolutely no water to anywhere even near the Los Angeles metro area.

It was a pointless waste of water that couldn't have had less to do with us here in LA.

Makes sense. Ethics and the importance of balance from exposure to the humanities are crucial parts of engineering education at most colleges.

I suspect self-taught types would be likely to skip over that given no requirements to visit those topics, much to the detriment of the rest of us.

I'm like 90% swyping. Started Android. Never bought the Swype keyboard.

A great journey, shaking those units down and seeing how they could perform, but for the electricity market PV is hard to argue with. Would be nice if the lessons learned about the optical and thermal sub-systems can be applied towards some niches in industrial process heat eventually.

It was in an evacuation warning area adjacent to the evacuated areas, hit by looters who were working that area & taking advantage while resources are busy dealing with every other aspect of this disaster.

ACAB and all that, but let's not be disingenuous and pedantic about what's happening.

Dude, dial it back & be reasonable. It's unfortunate, but ya, some looting is occurring. Many homes & businesses are evacuated & not burned or are just near these areas.

I was literally just turned away from a dentist appt in Pasadena because they got robbed last night & now can't provide services.