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I’ve never understood this position on biodiesel. I’ve had discussions with people who insist biodiesel isn’t viable because it isn’t net positive. When I point out that oil is a limited resource and corn is basically unlimited, they just stare at me and blink.

1. Different researchers have measured EROI in different ways. But my understanding is most biodiesels are EROI+. Corn is special. Corn is fucked up. Corn is the One Bad Biodiesel and it seems to only be created for US political reasons. Growing sugarcane biodiesel in south america is Good Biodiesel

2. If you think about it, biodiesel is like solar power that you can store in liquid form. Imagine biodiesel is EROI=1 and that *all* energy consumed in the biodiesel growing process comes from a nuclear fusion plant somewhere. This makes sense. 1 unit of fusion power = 1 unit of liquid vehicle gas.

The US has immovable political forces that mean huge amounts of corn must be grown. More than we can eat. We must figure out some way of justifying it on paper. Similarly, the hardware industry *has* to make bigger, more powerful chips all the time. What if demand doesn't exist? We manufacture it

This has been my explanation for a lot of tech nonsense since moore's law died ~2016. The biggest part of our economy simply could not be allowed to stagnate, so they've been thrashing around looking for ways to sell more, newer computers. Crypto, metaverse, nft, AI, even ray tracing to an extent.

I'd really like to be able to use raytracing. Like I'd really, *really* like to be able to. Unfortunately it's locked in a box of baffling APIs

You know, I had the thought that the LLM craze was due to hardware companies realizing they couldn't make transistors any smaller, so they couldn't rely on selling new chips to everyone every 3-5 years, so the only way they could keep growing was if the world needed *more* hardware.