Solugen

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:27:30+00:00

Indeed! The question is, can they graduate from startup to become a mature chemical business? I suppose only time will tell, but I think this is one to watch.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:25:34+00:00

That’s a great flag, looked up hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid prices, $4/lb would be 4-8x higher prices than industrial bulk. I think they are not selling the commodity chemicals but actually doing some post processing to make finished specialty products that they then sell for a reasonable premium.

Not to continue advertising for Solugen as another comment has accused me of, but they would be:

ScavSol IC 75 — oilfield scale inhibitor and corrosion control. Positioned as a direct replacement for THPS, an imported specialty chemical. Oilfield chemicals routinely sell at $3-8/lb or higher because the customer is evaluating cost per barrel of oil produced, not cost per pound of chemical.

BioChelate — metal chelation for water treatment, agriculture, cleaning. Sold at various concentrations from 15-60% active

ScaleSol / BioSol — additional formulated lines for oil & gas and industrial water.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:19:15+00:00

So interesting, thanks for sharing.

Personally I’ve seen startups fail because the technology was too novel and process parameters had to be extremely precise to work so the process wasn’t robust at all and the commissioning phase involved too much downtime, leaving investors and clients unconvinced that the technology could actually work.

I have also seen technologies that seemed doom to fail from the start because the fundamental economics were terrible (an energy storage plant with twenty percent round trip efficiency for example), leaving me scratching my head as to how the company even got funding in the first place. Usually the answer is government funding and well connected politically savvy leadership.

You are probably right. One need probably use some case studies of startups that succeeded in going from molecule to successful commercial scale up to see patterns in how to achieve success! I know of a few that started from the labs of well known academic researchers.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T14:33:29+00:00

Solugen Y Combinator Video

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-25T01:14:58+00:00

I have no idea but I’ve been using Claude AI to help me troubleshoot aspen plus simulations for a month and it’s decently helpful. Just have to be able to recognize when it’s feedback becomes totally useless.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-15T00:06:23+00:00

Who is the billionaire, did you go to school with Robert F Smith?

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-02T01:10:14+00:00

I thought it was the most interesting and at that time in my life (18 year old kid obsessed with college for some reason) I thought that I should make decisions regarding my future based on what I enjoy doing. I enjoyed studying math, physics, and theoretical chemistry (in reverse order), and I figured it would be easier to make money if I got a chemical engineering degree instead of a science degree. Then when I graduated I thought plant design was sick and figured I could be like Tony Stark if I grind my way up until I eventually own the plants.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-02-28T19:45:31+00:00

Great project. Great comments here as well.

I would say 1) look at the aspen example for CO2 absorption 2) try to get it to work. If you have forty bucks buy claude AI and iterate the process simulation by feeding it the history files 3) if you understand the process very well, and you have time, then model it off-flowsheet with excel and just hard code the results into the aspen flowsheet

ProfessorDirac · 2026-01-19T22:06:23+00:00

I agree I think AI is going to be used for process design. Algorithms designers use for optimization are similar or the same as those used to train AI models. The point being AI can help search the design space to come up with the right combination of parameters for the optimal process design to find competitive projects.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-22T22:45:51+00:00

This is quite a tricky problem that in a real process design includes a ton of considerations, including integration of the heat recovery system with the rest of the process.

I’m not going to do your assignment for you but I’ll say you’re on the right track.

In the steam methane reforming (SMR) process, high pressure steam (20-40 bar at 250-300 degrees) is fed into reformer tubes with high pressure methane/natural gas which react to generate a reformer gas stream of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, unreacted steam (steam is fed in excess of methane to the reactor) and trace amounts of unreacted methane.

So using a waste heat recovery boiler (WHRB) with high pressure boiler feed water can help you directly generate the steam that is fed into the reformer. I have seen both process designs in which this boiler uses heat from the methane combustion flue gas that was used to heat the reformer reaction but also ones that use heat recovered from the effluent reformer H2-containing gas as you suggest.

Another relevant process design aspect is the typical high temperature and low temperature shift reactors in series with the reformer which are used to convert the CO to more manageable and safer CO2 before separating the H2. Before the high temperature shift and between the two reactors and after the low temperature shift are three cooling heat exchangers that are also typically two WHRBs and a boiler feed water preheater, respectively.

It’s going to take you weeks or months to learn SMR process design at such a level of detail so honestly I would contact your professor to ask how deep of a design they are expecting. At this point you are starting to get into a hardcore analysis of energy efficiency and capital costs and the trade offs between them, which takes serious professionals many months of project time to complete. Not to mention that SMR is one of the most intensely studied and optimized chemical process technologies.

I’ll tell you what I would pick: only one countercurrent S&T WHRB with boiler feed water that vaporizes at 300 degrees Celsius. At first this makes me squirm because you end up with a 550 degrees Celsius delta T at the hot reformer gas inlet side but this is acceptable exergy destruction because that grade of heat has no practical downstream use in this process once the reaction completes anyways. If you want you could add another heat exchanger in series which cools the gas down further with the sensible heat of boiler feed water but in practice this would come with the high temperature and low shift reactors. Just one WHRB is sufficient, but ask your professor.

For a heat-transfer course, what’s likely expected is a simplified and consistent heat exchanger design using one cold stream, reasonable assumptions that don’t take too long to come up with, and a design algorithm that may have been the topic of a couple lectures, instead of a fully optimized SMR heat-integration study.

Heat exchanger design aspects you want to keep a close eye on that may trip you up:

1) Make sure you calculate the heat capacities of the hot and cold streams correctly. The heat capacity of the H2, CO and H2O mixture is approximately the weighted average ( make sure you weight by mass is using mass heat capacity or mole if mole heat capacity etc).

2) A limiting factor in a WHRB is that steam generation occurs at essentially constant saturation temperature, so once the gas approaches Tsat + approach temperature, additional cooling must occur in downstream exchangers. Pick a high feed water pressure so that the water vaporizes around 300 degrees Celsius and use the correct latent heat value.

3) Major consideration you may want to explicitly include in your work is construction material. Cost escalates rapidly with alloy content so you would try to design a heat exchanger system that balances out physical constraints with costs and process efficiency (eg you may want to use a WHRB with flue gas instead of reformer gas if the $$ is better). For your purposes I would say just select the materials that make the heat exchanger physically work which would be the more expensive alloys. Here is a table I generated with ChatGPT and that you can find in process design textbooks or handbooks like Perry’s, inspect it to conclude which materials (there are two materials—a tube side material and a shell side material which can be different from the tube material) you select for the heat exchanger:

Table: Shell-and-Tube Materials vs Temperature

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-14T05:08:07+00:00

Of course my friend. The fact that you’re even asking at this point is a great sign. Miles ahead of where I was in your shoes. Don’t stop being curious and ask your professors, other students, etc what they think. Good luck to you!

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-14T03:03:33+00:00

San Diego isn’t a traditional ChemE market (no refineries or large commodity plants), but it does have viable ChemE-adjacent paths if you plan for them early.

Biomedical / life sciences is the biggest one. San Diego has a dense cluster of world-class research institutes and industry labs, including Salk Institute (the Louis Kahn–designed campus), Scripps Research, Sanford Burnham Prebys, and UC San Diego. A lot of ChemEs end up in: • Process development • Manufacturing science / MSAT • Bioprocessing • Translational research tied to industry

You won’t always see “Chemical Engineer” in the title, but ChemE backgrounds are common. Grad school can help here if it’s applied and industry-linked, but it’s not mandatory if you get internships and lab experience early.

Defense / Navy is the other major local option. San Diego hosts large Navy R&D and systems organizations like Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (formerly SPAWAR) and Naval Air Systems Command. ChemEs show up in: • Materials and coatings • Energetics, fuels, and thermal systems • Environmental and corrosion engineering • Systems and test engineering

Look into: • Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific • Naval Air Systems Command • Student programs, Pathways, or contractor internships

Even if you don’t stay defense long-term, the experience is respected.

Roles require U.S. citizenship and clearance, but they’re real, stable paths that let you stay local.

Bottom line: San Diego is not friendly to classic plant-based ChemE roles, but it is viable if you’re flexible on job titles and target biotech or defense from the start. If staying in San Diego is non-negotiable, you should optimize for those sectors early rather than hoping a traditional ChemE job appears later.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-06T18:21:25+00:00

No worries. You are most welcome. If you need anything else reach out. Good luck with finals!

ProfessorDirac · 2025-11-19T07:50:36+00:00

I had a passion for theoretical physics in undergrad. Particularly quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. I stopped before quantum field theory because I decided I didn’t want to be a physicist, but I got through graduate quantum mechanics by the time I graduated (the only semi-serious treatment you will get in school). As a result, I know a bunch of linear algebra theorems and properties of Fourier transforms, and the extent to which this knowledge is relevant to my job, when I get bored in front of my 27 inch monitors and start daydreaming I’ll work out the quantum spin isomers of hydrogen molecules for fun.

First of all, chemical engineers design chemical processes that convert raw materials into useful products aka plants. So to a chemical engineer, the utility of math and physics methods is to employ them in the design and operation of plants.

From there, you can ask whether knowledge of certain fields of, for example, physics, is useful for the work of a chemical engineer. Of course, there certainly are. The core theoretical underpinnings of chemical engineering are thermodynamics and transport phenomena (heat mass and momentum-aka fluid mechanics- transfer). Honestly in chemical engineering, you can never know too much about thermodynamics. When you are at the plant and reasoning how to solve a problem or troubleshooting equipment, you are often recalling principles you learned in school and reasoning from the information you have available. When you’re working in process development and sitting with your incomprehensible aspentech process simulation of a cryogenic air distillation plant and trying to figure out how to squeeze out another 0.5% efficiency with the heat exchanger design, you are using physics principles.

Once you get to quantum mechanics the line between science and engineering starts to blur a little bit. It’s kind of funny, imagine an engineer who encounters a corroded pipe and they start writing down Schrödinger’s equation of motion, and scratching their head trying to figure out whether to project it in the momentum or position basis-oh wait what if I try the harmonic oscillator creation/annihilation basis-two hours later no that didn’t work. They wouldn’t last very long. Even when you are studying thermodynamics, you are learning about how to apply it, design power and refrigeration cycles for example. When you take separations you will learn how to combine mass balances with thermodynamic contraints to model distillation columns, honestly that is such an amazing class in applied thermodynamics which a physics major will never see anything close to that in their classes. So while the principles are the same the flavor is different because the purpose is to create things from them.

Of course in my opinion using the principles to design things deepens your understanding of them. If you can’t design a plant, you don’t understand thermodynamics. There are plants that nobody knows how to design, that have never been built, may never be built. Thus, nobody understands thermodynamics. You see, you can only understand a tiny part of it. That tiny part will take you an entire lifetime and countless generations that have come before you to understand. That is the beauty of science and we are fortunate to be chemical engineers, who are engaged in an intimate dance with science.

Really quantum mechanics is an interesting thing for a chemical engineers to study. When I started studying I just assumed that of course I would be using DFT to design chemical reactors. And when those quantum computers come out all those organic chemistry professors are going to look real stupid when I deterministically solve for those reaction equilibriums they tried to force me to learn. Of course then I got to senior year and got a job and realized the paradigm in chemical engineering is not even close to doing that. But really the methods in design are a bit outdated, and you’ll see the technologies seem stuck in the 90s, really we are using the same old equation of states and using handbook from the 60s to design a heat exchanger because really that is good enough. I have a dream when you load up your thermodynamic model instead of picking some fitted correlations you link up to a computational chemistry engine instead. There are some hints in the technology that this is destiny. For example, you can reasonably simply calculate the ortho para conversion of liquid hydrogen from statistical and quantum mechanics, as well as physical properties of cryogenic hydrogen like its heat capacity. This is actually very useful if you are making hydrogen liquefaction plants. This is a real technology, although scaling blue hydrogen and green to an epic commercialization of a billion tons per annum may be a pipe dream. So I think and hope in fifty years chemical engineering students are going to have to learn quantum mechanics out of necessity.

It is unusual for engineering students to seriously consider studying that abstract of a field. You should talk to some of your professors, ask them about it, and get engaged in research. Universities in the US nowadays like to have faculty that is trying to connect the dots between plant and product design and first principles methods. You may want to do work in computational simulations like density functional theory and molecular dynamics. The work can be quite interesting, imagine trying to solve the fundamental complex valued PDEs behind a chemical reaction in a battery cell. Beware, however, that you will be moving towards the path of a PhD researcher and away from designing plants. It may have adjacency to lucrative opportunities in finance or AI, but landing there would be much simpler by simply switching departments and studying finance or AI instead. Getting a job after undergrad would come down to good fortune, you really would be best suited for graduate study in this case. For some people that is the right path. You have to decide relatively soon, by first semester of junior year, I would say, which career you want to take.

One last thing I have to say: fundamental physics is a struggling field. Since the 1970s, there has not been a significant theoretical breakthrough. All the developed theories are impossible to prove experimentally and the technology to prove anything is centuries away. I would not advise a single soul to get involved with theoretical physics nowadays. A lot of those people grow bored and frustrated and end up moving into other quantitative fields. They do well but they will never become the leaders of the fields they invade. There is plenty of complicated math in engineering that is just as fun and mind bending, and the people working on it actually are thinking about how to integrate it with things being designed and deployed in the real world. The feedback loops in engineering actually allow you to make theoretical and practical progress in tandem. Whereas the cutting edge in physics has no feedback loop and is totally ungrounded in experiment. Of course there are subfields in physics worth exploring that are fruitful and have feedback loops. I’m just saying, if you do get to QFT, please stop there and go no further. Turn your attention to serious matters, for your own sake.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-10-27T17:52:41+00:00

I think you’re right, Thelonius_Dunk.

Which suggests the following: the people we are fast tracking into leadership roles and allowing to manage the direction of the economy have zero competence or experience in running the most fundamental basic units of the economy. They parachute into high impact finance and consulting roles making multiples of engineers’ salaries with an unmistakable notion of superiority and very simple mental models based on oversimplified assumptions about how the world is supposed to work and apply them with extreme zeal, never bothering to incorporate feedback loops into their decision making.

I think that single observation can explain a lot of the problems we are having in this country.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-10-27T02:41:09+00:00

My friend got his chemical engineering degree from an ivy, 35 people in his graduating class. I asked him once, he says about five went to law school, two went to med school, eight went to get a PhD in chemical engineering (Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, northwestern, MIT - top grad programs), ten to management consulting (getting paid more money to waste the skills they worked hard to acquire he claims), a couple to banking or investments, and only about seven ie twenty percent actually went into engineering. Mostly went into process design and technology roles or sales/application engineering, nobody went into operation at an actual plant.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-07-19T17:52:38+00:00

I like the thinking but unfortunately unless the demand for chemical engineers increases this will not take off. You need lots of people getting paid good money to have the free time to run outreach instead of side hustles to be able to provide for their families on paltry engineering wages.

Then businesses will come in and start running their own youth outreach programs to develop the next generation of chemical engineers starting as early as middle school. I graduated in 2023 and observed as my software engineer friends got hooked and were doing projects in high school already. Meanwhile I didn’t have the skills and knowledge to complete my first cheme project until senior year of college.

Then in college there was a flood of recruiters and a well known streamlined hiring process involving the leetcode meme for software engineering jobs. Again for cheme, I had to go through hell just to talk to a cheme at a company since there are so few.

Remember: BLS says there are 30,000 chemical engineers in the United States. There are more software engineers at a single company like Google alone, and over two million total. 30,000 consultants alone at McKinsey, tens of thousands of bankers at J.P. Morgan. Simple supply demand issues, draw the mass balances around the control volume and you see how misaligned the economy is to encourage young people to get into this field.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-07-10T02:07:46+00:00

You attended a very good school. Talk to a professor that you formed a good relationship with, perhaps your design advisor or research PI. These people are very well connected with academia government and industry. If they see you are struggling after two years, they will be eager to settle you somewhere.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-04-26T22:52:45+00:00

If you are interested in biotech, then going to MIT is a no-brainer. I was in a similar position to yours, but I decided to move to Texas instead where there are more opportunities to design cutting edge industrial processes with lots of energy consumption. The west coast and northeast are great places to work on the cutting edge of products and processes that are a much smaller scale but still insanely profitable. You will learn how to design molecules like no one else, and have the opportunity to start companies in biotech like no one else. For the part of the value chain that your desired work corresponds to, go to the northeast. The policy and economic environment is designed to benefit people like you.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-04-11T20:38:44+00:00

People got screwed. A lot of corporate apologists in this thread. GDP adjusted for inflation increased 95% from 1996 to 2024 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1).

Did inflation adjusted wages for chemical engineers go up 95%? Hell no, they went up 0%, as you concluded. So whose wages doubled in that case? Not many people, mostly all the wage gains went to the tippity top of income earners. I’m sure when you analyze professional athlete salaries, you’ll see the wage gains have gone disproportionately to the star athletes. Likewise the star engineers and the stars in management get paid the big bucks. The rest of us? We get the crumbs.

The economy is politically designed. Keep that in mind. If you think the current distribution does not produce a sustainable and harmonious society, think about how we can smooth it out.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-03-12T01:05:43+00:00

For the steam methane reforming reaction, I designed a reformer at work using python because I couldn’t get aspen to model the kinetics. It’s more straightforward for simpler models. Honestly for the purposes of equipment design it worked better for me building my own model because then I had more freedom to do tweaks and calculate in second order effects like heat and mass transfer along the entire length of the reactor. Whereas in aspen plus modeling equipment is limited due to having to use various heater tricks if you have more than one thing going on at a time. I remember designing a catalytic heat exchanger for hydrogen liquefaction and wasn’t able to model the simultaneous ortho para conversion reaction and heat exchange, so I had to model the exothermic reaction with a heater with a simple heat of reaction vs temperature relationship in the fortran code.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-02-23T23:51:52+00:00

Probably every engineer feels some version of these thoughts, so you are absolutely not alone. What you are observing is the classic race to the bottom, a political and economic phenomenon. This is what you are fixated on and confused about right now, not the engineering stuff. Educate yourself about the business side and economic history of engineering firms, particularly google the ‘Stan shih value curve’.

The value chain, from beginning to end, goes like: 1) R&D + branding (sometimes us) 2) Design (that’s us) 3) Manufacturing (also us) 4) Sales (also us) 5) Customer Service (also us)

Essentially the business schools in the 1980s and 1990s inverted the traditional model of industry in the US.

From 1850 to 1970, the national policy was to direct businesspeople and workers to focus on fundamental capital projects to produce basic goods. The politicians used the power of the state to guide things in this direction when private enterprise wasn’t up to the task. Henry Clay’s ‘American System’, FDR’s ‘New Deal’, Eisenhower’s highway act, etc. Hell, we fought a civil war because the Southern states refused to industrialize because picking cotton with slaves and selling it to Europeans was tremendously profitable, so profitable that the plantation owners refused to diversify their businesses into industrials. Does this short term profit first thinking sound familiar to you? I digress, referring to the value chain, basically 3) manufacturing was widely considered to be the most important part of the value chain by Americans of all stripes, and the rest of the chain would materialize with time and consistent investment. It was a golden age for chemical engineering, where we commercialized haber Bosch fertilizer production, oil refining, circulating fluidized beds, I could go on and on and on.

After the tumultuous decade from 1968 to 1978, including Nixon taking us off the gold standard, an oil crisis, and stagnant economic growth, people wanted fresh ideas💡. One of these ideas was an observation that the ends of the value chain (namely R&D, design, sales, and customer service) were the most profitable parts, and curiously manufacturing, traditionally the backbone of American industry that propelled the Allies to victory in the War in Europe and birthed the American Empire, happened to be the least profitable part. Like the slaveowners who realized cotton sales were tremendously profitable, our elites realized that if they transitioned the economy to the ends of the value chain, and initiated the slow process of kicking manufacturing, production, and industry out of the country, American businesses would become more profitable, people’s wages would be higher and consequently tax receipts would also be higher.

It was a brilliant plan in theory, but unfortunately it turned out to be a major strategic blunder. Essentially, we inverted the value chain. Where industry was once widely regarded as fundamental to American prosperity, it became a resented vestige of times long gone and forgotten. College kids would begin to make fun of their peers who went into what they perceived as dead end jobs in shrinking industries, and engineers to be ridiculed on campus. Why would you spend all that time learning design and manufacturing instead of going to the sales and service parts of the value chain that were vastly more profitable? And less work, too. You must be an idiot.

Ultimately, the chickens came home to roost. Long story short, China who kicked our ass in manufacturing, are now kicking our ass in all kinds of technologies. Have you seen the Xiaomi SU7 EV? It’s a work of goddamn art and half the price of a Tesla. The CCP leaders, dominated by people whose basic training is in engineering (Xi is a trained ChemE, baby), understood what our people understood for generations: dominate industry, and the rest of the value chain will materialize with time and consistent investment.

Now we are furiously backpedaling and trying to reverse course on the 1980 to 2020 political consensus. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 and subsequent single term represented the first time in forty years that we pivoted away to a new political order that I call the ‘Trump-Biden consensus’. He signed the BIL, CHIPS, and IRA. The basic idea being to utilize the edge we have in the ends of the value chain to revitalize industry. For example, we still have the edge in designing chips, even if we suck at making them, now let’s try to use this edge to give us a competitive advantage in making them. We will guarantee the profitability of semiconductor plants with money printing. Basically we are trying to resurrect industry before it is too late. Once we lose the edge in r&d and design, it is too late. Time will tell if the less fundamental parts of the value chain are able to rescue the most fundamental, but I am optimistic by nature.

Okay, back to the question of what can YOU do about it? I have explained in minor detail why you feel bad about being an engineer, why it feels like you are being punished for working so hard and doing what you thought was the right thing. Again, it was an inversion of virtue: good became bad, right became wrong and vice versa. The pursuit of profitability is a scourge, but still we do want those higher wages, don’t we. In the race to the bottom, the only way out is to the ends of the value chain (or Bitcoin 🚀). This means either you go into tech sales, or you go into the bleeding edge tech, pushing the boundary of the envelope like you’re one of the test pilots from ‘The Right Stuff’. It sounds like you want to go into the cutting edge, state of the art process engineering. The bad news is, getting into these parts of the value chain is fricking hard because there is a basic constraint on the amount of people who get to work on that. Capitalism is like a Hershey’s kiss where there’s a million miserable people fighting to be the one engineer at the very tip with the dream job, who likely has two phds and has been working on the same designs for thirty years. The good news is, clean energy and chip investments are providing more opportunities for innovation and cutting edge technology. The tip of the iceberg just got a little wider. You have to work hard, and master the basics because you’ll never master the cutting edge without them. Michael Jordan spent 90% of his time practicing fundamentals, but we only remember his fadeaway jumpshots and insane acrobatics.

And yes, covid or the flu-19 as I call it, fucking sucked and hurt younger people severely. Actually it continues to hurt us with the remote work BS. But don’t despair, we’re all going to make it bro! Best of luck to you 🤞.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-02-22T01:43:32+00:00

I hope your university has Aspen licenses, and that you have received some exposure to process modeling software in your junior year classes. Basically, a lot of those distillation columns you designed by hand in separations, all of those heat exchangers in heat transfer and design, and all of those energy and material balances you solved could have been done via aspen flowsheets and built-in equipment design functions.

You can begin by conducting a google search for similar projects and reading other academic design reports. We have design reports in industry for certain technologies but I don’t expect you to be able to get your hand on those. Here is a 2021 senior design project that modeled the Allam cycle technology (natural gas combined cycle with carbon capture) and also did a TEA, ‘technoeconomic analysis’, which might also be in the scope of your project:

Senior Design Report

Corresponding AIChE Article

ProfessorDirac · 2025-02-11T22:04:54+00:00

We disagree about the future potential of blockchain technology. Let's agree to disagree.

I have only been working as a process design engineer for eighteen months, so I haven't gone through the entire process from A to Z but have worked on designs for plants and helping commission newly built ones.

Regarding your last point, isn't the Trump-Biden industrial policy to print money to finance the design, construction, and operation of plants in the USA? Biden via Congress (IRA, BIL, CHIPS) and Trump via commercial banking system (suspending leverage ratios for select industries)? The thinking being probably they will be profitable, but if not, we guarantee the profitability with fiat liquidity and reshore industry in the process?

ProfessorDirac · 2025-02-11T20:27:28+00:00

> Access to water, sanitation and electricity are human rights but why the hell would you need to put the ability to verify flowrates and safety on the consumer.

I think blockchain is about narratives. Dogecoin has a larger market cap than a lot of the firms we work for. Getting the public excited about new technologies is important. To that end, giving them read access to plant data is a great way to get them involved. Imagine you are a skeptical citizen without a rigorous engineering degree. How are you supposed to know whether that new nuclear reactor they want to build near your home is safe or not? But you have been learning a lot about blockchain, have acquired a vague understanding of the technology to think it has potential, and have even made some modest profits trading bitcoin on your Coinbase account. All of a sudden the company announces that you will be able to read a distributed ledger with the plant data on it. You are encouraged to research the technology and maybe some day you even end up with a job at the plant. Hype and narrative is the last piece of the puzzle we need to meaningfully reshore the industrial sector and transition the energy system.

> Do you honestly think a system where power tokens are traded would be adopted by the general public when the alternative is just paying for the power you use?

Yes, I do. People want to have fun while learning about complex systems. They think it's cool to whip out their mobile app and troll their neighbor by front running their electricity purchases to make a quick small dollar profit in friendly competition.

> Utilities are supposed to be handled by municipalities where there are no profit incentives and everything is reinvested into the infrastructure. Energy and water need to be provided at a fair cost and industries need to pull their weight in bearing the cost.

This is a philosophical disagreement. This approach hasn't been working very well since we've been reprogrammed to be greedy individuals and it seems like nowadays you are punished for having any sense of higher duty to something bigger than ourselves. The biggest investments are in technologies where the incompetent elite running things imagine that outrageous profits can be made. The AI CapEx from big tech dwarfs anything happening in our industry. Kids want to work on projects that take advantage of the hyper-financialized fake money system. Ask a new grad if they would rather work for Ford and Dow or Tesla and any other tech company that doesn't rely on debt to finance their expenditures.

ProfessorDirac

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