sunstone

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Personally these stories are just as likely to be hit pieces orchestrated by competitors that want to slow musk down. If he was really as you suggest he would have a hard time recruiting world class talent such as Jim Keller.

China's population is starting to decline this year (if I'm not mistaken) but from a high of quite a lot. More importantly when are they going to put Winnie the Pooh out to pasture? It's very little about the Chinese people and much more about the current leadership. Where's Deng Xiaoping when you need him?

Asia is helpful but Europe is essential.

The patent portfolio for LFP could be used for free only in China since about 2003. The patents expire everywhere next year.

Weirdly, if you're over 40 and have been reading for a while and then look up and notice everything looks blurry in the distance, you can tighten up every muscle in your body for about ten seconds and when you relax much of your distance vision will be recovered. Let's call in the poor man's reversal.

To some extent EV batteries can trade off recharge rate for power density. That is, if you can recharge your battery in five minutes you might not care as much that it's range is only 200km. The sodium batteries do have high recharge rates and lower cost. Not to mention being better in the cold.

These attributes make it a good complement for lithium ion and it looks like CATL already has such a battery already to at least the prototype stage.

Seems like a complementary match for Tesla's 4680 chemistry. Apparently the markets thought so too. It would be outside China though, there's not much to indicate Tesla will be moving 4680's to China any time soon regardless of the chemistry.

In Australia if I recall correctly, foreign buyers are only able to buy newly built homes. Canada would benefit from a similar rule, it would stimulate more housing and not impact the demand for existing homes.

On the other hand both YouTube channels and podcasts have found a spoken audience. And YouTube is often just someone(s) talking (eg PBS Space Time) that could easily be a podcast.

I'm old enough to remember almost nothing...

I think he meant to say a 'metastisis'.

A lot of talk about drops and latentcy here. It may be that once/if they get the optical links between satellites working, along with just more satellites, most these issues may fade into the paat. Say two to five years.

As long as Eric is not vaccinated then it's ok.

Perhaps he's just being tired of being embarrassed by his Ex who's been donating billions while he has senior citizens peeing in bottles in his warehouses.

I was wondering the same thing. HVDC is 'an under the radar' technology that is set to rework a lot of the grid world wide. With projects underway to send power from Australia to Singapore or Iceland to the UK it's likely to turn up in many places, even California.

Bezos,"I love humanity, it's the people I can't stand."

Yes, it's called 'the sun'.

The pronoun 'they' is perfectly fine and gender neutral.

Surface based missiles would suffice.

That's where HVDC transmission lines come in to move the power to where it's needed. Could be thousands of miles away.

Though there are the smart people who live for getting to the simple core of complicated things. Please someone send me that guy's explanation of entropy.

What seems much more likely to me is that the Japanese government and the Japanese management of Nissan felt they had a right to controlling ownership of Nissan after that had been purchased and turned around by Ghosn. In the circumstance, if that's what they wanted, then they should have bought it back rather than setting up a kangaroo court.

I suspect from now on companies with subsidiaries in Japan will be sure their top level meetings don't take place on Japanese soil.

The thing I can't believe is that Japan's trading partners like USA, Canada, UK, Europe etc. haven't said boo about this outrageous miscarriage of justice in which the Japanese government has been complicit. As for as I know not one government has spoken out publicly.

Imperceptibly, over a decade, it seems Google and Microsoft are changing places.

The lack of cold chains in many parts of Africa will limit the places the vaccine can get to regardless of vaccine supply.

Not quite correct. The condensed matter physicists do understand how they work. The problem is it's complicated so the "theory" they teach undergrads is dumbed down to be more palatable.

The sleight of hand comes in where, in the beginning, the "holes" are atoms in the substrate that have lost an electron which, by the time the hall effect appears, those holes are now moving but in the beginning they were stationary.

In fact, in semiconductor physics as taught, both the 'electron' and 'hole' are in fact quasi-particles and only tenuously connected to the electron of the standard model.

Car maker's attraction for fuel cells is that they neatly replace the internal combustion engine with another large, heavy, hot mechanism that continues to require about the same amount of ongoing maintenance. So the automaker's balance sheet remains about the same but now it's green.

As Musk pointed out some years ago, hydrogen is not so much a fuel as it is an energy storage medium. Right out of the gate creating the hydrogen reduces the system efficiency by about 50% because of the electricity required.

In essence then hydrogen fuel cells are just a less efficient form of electricity that require a complex and expensive mechanism to turn into motive force. Possibly useful for shipping or trains but not the way to bet for cars.

I guess that would be a false economy then.

Ok, actually fire.