matmatmatmat

I'm not in favor of giving Putin money, but I am in favor of dependencies. Dependencies are what keep people from invading each other's countries when there's trouble. People are unlikely to start bombing their customers.

I have the same complaint about the Bolt's radio. It seems the issue is that pressing the power button merely mutes the radio. If you can figure out how to actually turn off the radio when the car is on, it doesn't turn back on when the car is turned on.

The infotainment in mine also sometimes will not boot for a good 5-10 minutes. Why. I don't know.

Otherwise, I love the damn thing and wish it weren't a giant fire hazard.

Well, maybe in the past.

> No, this isn't the reason. Straight, clear communication of facts from professionals is one of the best ways to combat erroneous viewpoints.

For better and for worse, this is not true with most people. Most people are most open to changing their viewpoints if you engage them in a manner where you try to take their side, first, and then lead them in a new direction.

Straight facts might work best for you, but I'm afraid they're pretty much a sure-fire away to turn off most adults who've already made up their minds and don't already agree with you.

Thanks for the clarification!

My understanding is that synthetic fertilizers are (at least in part) made using crude oil. Would be interested to hear an expert chime in.

This is wildly optimistic, but personally, I'm looking forward to CO2 captured from the atmosphere, reformed into hydrocarbons on-site, and used as feedstock in the global plastics and fertilizer trades.

Yes, balancing that equation is going to require energy input. Yes, probably gonna require some pretty smart chemists. But impossible? Well, I don't see why not.

Edit: There's probably not that much utility in this. See comments below.

They're very underground, you've probably never heard of them.

Nit: They are unenforcable, but not illegal in themselves: https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...

I have a group of friends who all worked there (San Diego office, formerly Cymer), half of whom have quit. They complained of massive inefficiency (very bureaucratic, lots of meetings), relatively low pay, difficulty moving around, feeling overworked but still shipping buggy software, and some difficult colleagues.

I also happen to know a project manager there who had a bit of a rocky time getting started (overworked), but I think is now happy there.

To be honest, my friends have put me off from working there, but who knows, it could just be a biased impression and maybe the company is working to turn things around.

If buying from ebikes.ca, be sure to write them with your planned purchase and ask them to verify that it makes sense and if they're seeing any issues with it.

Some parts/combinations have known issues that you're just better off avoiding.

Haha, don't know where the downvotes are coming from, this is the absolute truth right here.

He knows the world idolizes him as a slightly eccentric genius engineer with a heart of gold, and I think there's probably some truth in that, even. Nevertheless, if you are smart enough to be a good engineer, it doesn't take much to realize that you can greatly expand your aura by occasionally trolling people with something stupid just to see if you can get away with it. The fans will adore him more, the critics will pounce, but the net result is more exposure, and more exposure gets investment money. Rinse, repeat.

Personally, I think one of the smarter touches is to release/leak information that looks bad shortly before releasing information saying that the problem was overcome. This constantly reinforces the impression that anything Musk-related is always overcoming impossible odds. "Andrej didn't think we could do it, what do you think now, Andrej?" "The Starlink terminal costs $2400, but just a few months later, it costs $1000!"

I'm sure FSD will be here by Christmas.

I don't know, given Elon's showmanship, is it really that different?

What do you think about ITER?

Non-agricultural use makes up about 16%, IIRC, but not sure how "household/urban" use fits in there.

Just a small point about Texas: Although it still pumps huge amounts of oil and gas, it also has more wind power resources that it could deploy. Texas could have a lower carbon future if it so chose.

COW filesystems have more write amplification than non-COW FS's, which will wear out the SSD more quickly.

Plenty of people, including me, have never lost a single bit to btrfs.

Now, is it super fast? (No.) Is it (or any other COW FS) the right choice for an SSD or database? (Probably not.) Is it the right choice for data that get read much more often than written and you'd like to be sure 10 years from now that you haven't lost any of it? (There's a pretty good argument to be made there, I think.)

I would be interested to know what the technical hold-ups were. Bad training data? Insufficient/noisy sensors? Insufficient battery life? Or, was it all just bad management, with a lack of vision and leadership?

> Go ahead and start "fixing earth" then, you're free to do so if you think it is "sexy".

I don't think it's sexy, at all. It's hard work, but it's also necessary.

> "colony run by a dictator"

A space colony is a pretty harsh environment. I'd be that it'll tend toward harsh, centralized leadership sooner rather than later, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong on that. In my defense, the things that make democracy possible -- plentiful resources, some level of societal trust, public safety -- are not going to be plentiful on Mars.

> Humankind needs a frontier to strive towards, this has always been the case and will probably remain so.

Agreed.

> There used to be many frontiers but technology has developed as such a rapid pace that they're starting to become quite rare.

Disagree. It is still the case that every question we answer in science leads to two more. Now, granted, not everyone needs/wants/can be a scientist.

> As said, feel free to "fix the Earth" but may I suggest framing this in a more positive and inspiring way?

Yeah, I probably should've, that would've probably been more convincing.

I don't believe this is true.

Undertaking the risk of exploration has -- I would venture to say -- almost always had some economic, political, or military motive. Someone had to see some potential gain for the risk they were undertaking.

To be clear, I'm not frustrated at Elon for spending his money like this. I mean, if it were his money, because it's not. He's spending his investors' money, which he raises for himself by selling these ideas. I'm less excited by my government spending money on this, but, yes, it's not really that much.

What frustrated me more were the comments that appeared to be divorced from reality about what space exploration will bring.

That's a silly strawman argument; no one is seriously asking for this.

> Man belongs wherever he wants to go – and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.

I find this level of optimism completely unwarranted. Plenty of people have died trying to go places they hadn't gone to before, or if they simply had to leave where they were. Explorers, places with overpopulation, refugees, I mean, the list really goes on.

> Furthermore, no, you can't fix Earth now. The only possible way to achieve that is eradicating humanity.

I disagree, and I think this is far too pessimistic. Food security, climate change, politics, all huge, huge problems, but there's real progress being made on all those fronts.

This argument would have a lot more merit if Earth and Mars were similar, but they're utterly not. The difficulty, expense, and risk of setting up life on Mars absolutely pales in comparison to cleaning-up life on Earth.

Suppose there were a Mars colony. How many years before that colony could go on indefinitely if it didn't have support from Earth?

I'm stunned at the level of "optimism" in these comments. Guys, we're not going to be setting up colonies on Mars, we're not going to setting up heavy industry in space. There is literally no. point. at. all. Mars is less hospitable than even the least hospitable places on Earth. "Heavy" industry, pretty much by definition, means it's way cheaper to do it on Earth than in space (no amount of rocket development will ever overcome those physics.)

I'm barely, just barely, partial to the argument that there should be a Mars colony so that humanity could go on even if we wiped ourselves out on Earth, but the challenge of an off-Earth colony is so great, I'm pretty reluctant we'll see anything successful in the next 50 years. Even once you figure out all the mechanics of building something in a high radiation/below freezing/basically no atmosphere environment, you have to figure out how to get a few dozen people to work together for _years_ without interpersonal conflicts destroying the whole mission.

Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator.

It is unclear to me why anyone would vote this down. It's spot on.

This seems like such a short-sighted move by Qualcomm, is there some reason that they would do this and risk losing Google as a customer? Or, did they always assume that they would lose Google as a customer and so they thought it wouldn't be worth the investment?

> canada is over 81% of the eligible

Cries in American.

Got a link to where I could pick up those LFP cells for just over $100/kWh?

Genuine question, as a private individual looking into residential storage, what kind $/kWh should I be expecting if I could get the system and install it myself, and why is it so much higher than the big manufacturers? Is it just volume?