hmm that's about 30 layers of Cu crystal worth of width per cell...

I wonder what how water is gong to behave in such a tight space.

apparently most electrolytic caps do, and the reason they're electrolytic is because that allows them to make that oxide very thin.

Would yours have an oxide later? How thick?

I think what's crazy is that a composite material has more insulating capacity than any of it's parts. I shouldn't be that surprised because this can be demonstrated by leakage in an H2 electrolyzer, seeing power take a longer route through electrolyte, only to avoid the plates.

I have a second hypothesis, which is that electrical discontinuity in a floating plate is more-or-less irrelevant. So if it's cut in halves, or quarters, or eights, or so on, each piece still does the job, and the total is the sum of it's parts.

Based on these two hypotheses, I infer that I can make a cheap capacitor by mixing a slurry of carbon nano-particles in gel electrolyte, and placing those between anode and cathode plates or rod and tube. The idea is that any path of current between anode and cathode is going to pass through the same number of nano-particles +- say 5%, and that number is the number of "virtual" neutral plates.

A couple of challenges:
1. The plates need to be very well aligned, because a narrow side will create a part of the capacitor with fewer particles to pass through.
2. Particle size needs to be fairly homogenous because if there's one large particle, it will potentially create a very short path which will reduce max voltage. Mixing of the particles needs to be excellent so that any given cross-section has roughly the same distribution of particle sizes.

Beginning a thought about the prospect of mass global #underwork.

The definitions and thresholds of employment used by governments are way more granular than just “in work” or “has job”. So underworking is likely to be far more prevalent than the data derived from self-reported survey responses. And the vision of labour market transformation thanks to sparkly new futurey jobs is very light on detail about new job stability or income sufficiency.

abs.gov.au/methodologies/labou…

Labour Force, Australia methodology, June 2025

^{Australian Bureau of Statistics}

Why think about this as #underwork not underemployment? Because underworking is a human condition with human impact, like overworking. Underwork is a social situation.

And unless the sparkly new futurey jobs show up, AI driven underworking will expand the demographic of an established and generationally impactful underworking class: working under the level of wealth creation, working insecurely, with fewer protections, weaker access to fair work provisions, solidarity or safe protest.

These are long term political choices.

And the threshold of being countable as employed in Australia is one hour paid work a week, and can be not even that. So the unemployment rate references this number, not any common sense understanding of sufficient work to live on. It includes all the teenage workers 15 and up.

Within this are nested the underemployed who report themselves in a monthly survey of around 50000 Australians as employed and either having had expected working hours reduced, or preferring to work more than their normal working hours.

So this is how we get an official underemployment rate of 5.9% in Australia.

#underwork

Why this matters: if you hear that 150 workers have been ejected from their seats, but you just heard that employment levels are both high and stable, you might think: that’s ok, there will be another job.

But when you factor in underemployment, which includes people already losing sufficient work and people who didn’t have sufficient work to begin with, things look tougher.

Political choices that favour business and growth are long-term social choices about how we live, who gets to flourish, who gets by, who gets trapped in #underwork.

US labour market data makes the news, in a predictable way, by confounding the Tantrum in Chief. The thing to notice though is that the science of estimation always makes people testy because labour market vitals feed into consumer confidence and political futures. Meanwhile behind the data, every point is a person, a family, a community. #underwork

abcnews.go.com/Business/hiring…

Trump fires BLS commissioner after weak jobs report and baseless claim of 'faked' stats

Fresh jobs data showed a major slowdown of hiring in recent months.

^{Max Zahn (ABC News)}

This from @scottsantens on UBI is detailed and clear. Work related poverty is expanding; capitalism is failing humans as well as the planet. Capitalism as a system cannot deliver us from its own intended impacts. So, something new is needed, and urgently.

#underwork

hachyderm.io/@scottsantens/114…

Scott Santens

2025-08-01 14:17:09

A reporter reached out to me last month with questions about Universal Basic Income that required hours of my time to answer. Here are all the answers I wrote to all the questions, none of which ended up being published by them.

scottsantens.com/what-the-medi…

What the Media Isn’t Telling You: Why Universal Basic Income Is the Answer to Poverty, Insecurity, and Inequality

A Newsweek reporter recently asked me — with a sense of urgency mind you — to provide expert answers on UBI for a story. I answered all their questions in detail by deadline. They never replied.

^{Scott Santens (UBI Guide)}

Curious about how US monthly labour market data is estimated? As in Australia, sample surveys.

investopedia.com/articles/04/0…

What You Need to Know About the Employment Report

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment report is a widely watched indicator of economic well-being that directly influences the market.

^{Mark Mahorney (Investopedia)}

The US takes a granular view of “not working” in the survey period, including the subcategories of “discouraged worker” and “marginally attached to the labor force”. Among workers, “involuntary part-time workers” are what Australia would call the underemployed. This is the social experience that is rapidly becoming lifetime or even generational #underwork.

The language of labor underutilization used in US reporting moralises the problem of work, making it a problem that affects government and business rather than a social harm that affects people and communities.

bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm

Concepts and Definitions (CPS)

^{Bureau of Labor Statistics}

Caveat: I’m not a statistically literate person, far from it. I’m really just thinking about how employment reporting is a languaging practice, a storytelling practice, and all kinds of political vibing. Trump’s tantrums make this clear, but it was already there like climate change: however you count whatever you count, the underlying lived experience of trying to get through these times is that water is rising faster than we’re prepared for.

#underwork