danans

I noticed the same in India not long ago. Unlike in the US, there is broad cultural aspiration toward electric vehicles.

Even tuk-tuk/rickshaw drivers (who are largely lower income) have EV choices, while in the US lower income workers - like rideshare drivers - don't have many cheaper electric options, since EVs are mostly priced for upper income people.

It doesn't hurt that India has to import the vast majority of the petroleum it uses, and has unlimited solar resources.

> most customers buying from different US entities

I understood "customers" here to mean companies training AI models, buying human labor to assist with that.

It's interesting that in Europe the customer and the labor appear to be relatively colocated. Any theories as to why?

> AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.

All of this is true, but the reality is that LLM agents free up time for people to make judgement by taking care of the grunt work, which means each person can do more. That increased efficiency can mean higher revenues in growth industries and higher profits (through reduced labor force) in stable or declining industries.

> - trading (who knows best when to buy how much?)

That seems odd. Does a local water futures market exist.

> - consumer-facing marketing

If it's all going through the same pipes, what is there to market.

Electricity is a different story - it can be traded day ahead and even marketed, but none of that makes sense for water delivered over shared infrastructure.

> In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?

No, I mean the fraud continuing, and how much of a culture of knowingly cheerleading and gaslighting fraud exists in a forum such as this. Is it the majority, or is it a loud minority.

From Theranos to meme coins and NFTs, there is a long history of shilling for outright fraud here.

The documentary aside, if she hadn't been caught for the fraud, I wonder how many of us (myself included) would be singing her praises. I wonder how many people are operating like she did right now.

What a wonderful illustration of the technofeudalism that many seem eager to push our world into. That doesn't diminish the engineering feat it embodies, in fact it rhymes pretty well.

In parts of South Asia crows are considered messengers to dead ancestors and are hence fed as part of memorial rituals. This role is probably in no small part due to observations of their intelligence.

I recently learned of - but have never tried - a cheese from the Himalayan region of South Asia that is reputed to be the "hardest cheese in the world". Apparently it is exported to the West as a dog treat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhurpi

It's not so much being unplugged as it is sensing whether the mains power is down. If it is, they stop backfeeding immediately, just like hardwired solar inverters do.

If this weren't done, there would be risk of electricution to anyone working on wiring in the house or on the utility distribution network.

Yes, but last I checked the bidi chargers were proprietary - tied to vehicle manufacturer - which is a huge disincentive. I don't want my home's battery connector locked into a vehicle brand/manufacturer.

> Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day

Only on peak demand days, of which there are only a handful every year.

I have Enphase batteries enrolled in an equivalent program, so I've tracked how much I make. Definitely not enough to make much of a dent in the payoff time for the batteries. But a nice perk nonetheless.

> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.

If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.

There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.

There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).

You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.

Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.

If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)

The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.

> Tech communities like this skew more libertarian

Indeed, this is historically a forum with lots of "temporarily embarrassed billionaires".

My observation is the opposite of the GP - that labor identity and consciousness (not "liberalism") is rising here, pushed in no small part by the transformation in labor value that LLMs have caused.

> The demand is already there. It's the supply that is the issue.

Somehow many societies are able to power a huge amount of transportation via electrified rail and bus systems. That's an existing solution that requires zero new technology.

And of course there are EVs for places that somehow can't figure out how to do electrified mass transit.

> Wrong. Storage is the issue

And what's great about EVs is that they are also storage. In winter you can buy electricity from places that do have solar potential - it's not far from Switzerland.

I'd rather we ask how quickly demand can be transferred to other energy sources, like electricity.

> EVs are a minority in China outside of a few biggest cities

Those biggest cities are majorly influential in absolute energy demand and also patterns of use.

The second tier cities will be buying the big cities used EVs in not too long.

> my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"

The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.

A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.

Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.

If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.

There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.

> You can print money, but you can only ""print"" oil for a short time from reserves, which the US and China have been draining.

What's different between the two is that apparently China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves, despite no significant reduction in travel, and despite reducing its import demand by 1 OPEC.

It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.

Apparently the main reason they have started buying crude again is not for internal consumption as much as taking advantage of the massive crack spread in refined petroleum products (like diesel) which they export.

> if it is too dangerous the go through bab al-mandab strait it is more lucrative to sell the crude oil to europe at a discount?

I suspect they would sooner curtail production rather then sell at a discount due to route restrictions.

> whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and s

Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.

Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.

> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.

Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.

> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.

Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.

> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.

That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.

> But I think you'd struggle to argue that the caste system doesn't result from Hinduism.

The "Hindu" caste system results from the history of social hierarchy in the Indian subcontinent. What you are calling "Hinduism" is a relatively recent construct that has emerged as a response to religions with more centralized/uniform doctrines and institutions. There are belief systems categorized under this "Hinduism" label that overtly reject caste systems (and have done so for centuries), while others overtly uphold it.

Other societies also have caste systems, just differently rationalized than the one present in some belief systems that fall under the "Hindu" banner. I'm not excusing any of these systems whether Hindu or not - they are all a blight on humanity - but they are also a feature of many societies whether or not they use the particular term "caste".

Some clear examples of excluded/oppressed castes outside of the South Asian context are the Burakumin in Japan, the al-Akhdam in Yemen, and the Mestizos with more indigenous ancestry in Latin America.

> or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc.

The historical prominence of the slave trade in both the Christian and Islamic worlds should make it quite clear that it was hardly "unthinkable" but instead very rationalizable.

Rigid systems of social power hierarchy and oppression based on ancestry, perceived race, and occupation (which is a lot of what the worst part of caste is) were very much features of Christian and Islamic societies, even if their religions didn't codify them.

> I would be very surprised if the manufacturer would sell you one without you agreeing to indemnify them.

Why would anyone other than a fool agree to indemnify Tesla against liability for a vehicle whose driving behavior is controlled by Tesla?

> If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government,

Ironically, in this narrow way, the US is becoming more like China: authoritarian control in the functioning of corporations. In the case of the current US administration, it ends up being poorly thought out policies like broad tariffs without industrial policy to support them, and shallow nationalist stunts like this.

> then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start democratically regulating them directly - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

The only way this happens is if Congress claws back the power it had ceded to the Presidency (which the current administration has even overstepped). That will only happen when US voters start electing representatives who are not controlled by those corporations. We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

Why would they do that? Their goal is to stay in the good graces of the administration, to avoid financial or legal retribution.

If you think conscientious resistance is anywhere on the agenda of these corporations, I'd refer you to the inauguration photos and donation list, and the various acts of public supplication by their executives.

I don't even think it's wrong for them to do any of that - at least now the mask is off - but people should stop looking to corporations to take moral stances, despite their attempts over decades to convince you to attribute morality to them.