How does a person with an ICE car cope if their wife goes into labour just after they ran out of gas? Simple; if'' this is a risk, they don't. As long as your wife is close to due, you don't. If your car gets below double the range needed to get to hospital you stop and charge it.

If you just put it into charging and your wife goes into labour, you simply disconnect and drive to the hospital.

I'm not selling; I'm providing info for an engineering trade off calculation. I'm also marvelling that something that is the first generation of a new technology is already outclassing a massively mature technology in the ICE powered tenders for quite a number of applications and is considerably cheaper in a number of applications.

Right. This requires thought and pre-planning though and that seems to have been lacking.

They may be aware of the risks, but that doesn't mean it's okay to be negligent. If Russian teams are bringing in technology, their locations should be given to the rebels and sufficient weapons systems to allow them to be removed from the scene.

There are nutrients and nutrients. Clover definitely captures nitrogen and puts that into the soil. However, for example, zinc, which likely comes from the rocks which form the soil will not be replaced.

Not in the US (UK) but mentioned them precisely because I know they are an upper limit and because that's where these trucks are coming first.

I agree US limits are more dangerous and it does partly explain why they have more accidents, however I guess it's also true that much US long distance driving is easier than European with longer stretches of more open road. Also, by the time you've driven 10 hours, you can have crossed several countries here and still be in the same state over there. The differences are not just that American life is cheap.

You missed, two boxes down in your table, that after 8 hours driving you have to take a 30 minute break (during which you recharge). That's 11 hours on duty but not actually 11 hours of straight driving. It's not the clearest source, but it's actually stricter than the one I looked up which allowed 10 hours driving in 14 hours of duty.

A good aim is to reduce. If your particular application turns out better with a battery truck and a fossil trailer then you are doing better than if you used fossil both. Later you can maybe convert to a battery trailer if there's one that works.

Yes, I think that's a good summary of this particular situation. Both of the parties here are evil, Musk is clearly showing how you should never partner with him and OpenAI is getting what they deserve for knowingly setting up in that context. However it misses the wider context that there are also much more other different competition out there. If OpenAI dies completely, but their systems are released as Open Source and inform systems like ollama, openclaw and so on then that's a net gain.

Even if OpenAI simply dies completely and due to this that's probably a net benefit. We have seen from their recent lawfare attacks on Claude and other commercial competitors, they are a net negative even in the commercial AI space.

Overall, the main thing is that there should be appropriate justice and that the principle that companies that represent themselves as working in the public good should not be able to abandon that and still profit are far more important than our justified and reasonable dislike or even hatred of Musk.

Generally, simply not by any useful amount. Adding more battery always adds more weight which reduces range. At some point, you are at a flat stage where more battery adds the same amount of range as it reduces. The largest battery cars are a bit below that in normal operation but not by much so it just isn't worth it.

Maximum of 8 hours of driving before a 30 minutes break, with a maximum of a two hour extension in the case of adverse conditions according to US laws, so 10 hours would cover the worst case. You could average over 50MPH and still be fine.

Glad to hear; I think it is worth being clear that the nuclear vs renewables argument should be about emphasis and priorities much more than straight up one or the other. I do think, given Russian attacks on nuclear plants, we seriously need to think about the risk of nuclear weapons attacks on nuclear power plants and the amount of radiation that could spread. Unfortunately the non proliferation argument seems to be lost, so the only possible solution is probably to make it clear that any civilization that targets nuclear power plants will utterly cease to exist.

Smelting is a good special case, however I think you are underestimating the risk of the nuclear power option compared e.g. to wind. An entire 3GW nuclear plant can *all* trip at the same time for the same reason (e.g. an earthquake, a reactor leak, even if contained, a terrorist attack and so on). They just have to be more sensitive to shutdown. Widely distributed wind (with a spread wide enough that there is always wind somewhere - e.g. Morocco to Scotland, Southern Californa to Alaska - doesn't have that problem because the failure of one turbine or even farm is unlikely to stop production.

Building such a system nowadays, I'd want to build next to a local hydro plant, add a local battery with an hour or two of capacity reserved for me and a few more used to keep the local grid stable and then have a diverse supply. The key thing is that the penalties on the utility for supply failure have to be more than enough to motivate them to put my supply before the consumers.

Nuclear baseload has been a big problem for the grid. It just isn't flexible enough and the need to absorb huge amounts of energy during periods of low demand is really difficult. I kind of agree with you though. In fact the opposite. Once there is a very high renewable grid, with a fair amount of distributed storage and once all of that grid, including local solar generation is able to be remote controlled properly, as we adapt to and create more industrial processes with demand that can be based on energy price, for example future hydrocarbon fuel productino from water and atmospheric carbon dioxide then actually a nuclear base load plant becomes much easier to handle.

The main thing, though, is that what is missing from most grids worldwide is enough wind energy. We want to see wind providing something like 150% of night time energy demand and then start to optimize the rest for a completely new, much cheaper, energy world.

Largely I agree, but the basic point is that they were all trying to take advantage of public good statements and identity to get more personal profit. It's good for the public if the end result is that the public is protected over everyone involved and, next time that it's Musk trying to take away from the public good he also doesn't get away with it.

The main point though, is that in the sea around Scotland and off Marocco, you could put ten thousand offshore turbines and the main environemental impact would be an increase in sea life.

Furthermore, if the governments chose to do that and put serious effort into clearing away legal and institutional barriers - both planning and access to transmission, all of those turbines could be completed and running before you could even get one new nuclear plant. By putting them in both Scotland and Marocco (ideally also Norway and Ireland) and ensuring an appropriate level of overbuilding you would end up with a balanced supply that would have a higher overall critical availability level than the nuclear plant.

The union rules say 6 hours per day, and if everybody stuck with it that it'll be fine. Unfortunately some parents don't stick with the plan and spoil it for everyone childless people are often left alone dining in a silent restaurant with no screaming children for company. That means that some of us parents have to spend ten hours a day just moving from restaurant to restaurant and looking for people trying to read quietly. No rest for the wicked, as they say.