And Prussian Blue, of all things, speaking of dirt cheap

Yeah, great, if you don't care about interstitial water reducing stability and capacity (with a tendency to reabsorb more water after manufacturing); problems with cation vacancies and structural defects; voltage instability due to multi-step redox reactions; difficulty achieving sufficient purity at scale for battery applications; and moderate gravimetric / poor volumetric density compared to alternatives.

People need to stop talking about na-ion like it's just "take li-ion and swap out the cation". It's very different chemistry to master. There are absolutely no guarantees that it will ever beat li-ion on cost. People are certainly trying. They might succeed. But we cannot realistically speculate as to what the ultimate tradeoffs will be, when we don't even know the general category of chemistry that's even going to win out.

The main reason sodium ion batteries are promising as a technology is because it's cheap

No. They "are" [present tense] not cheap. Their is speculation that with sufficient development and sufficient production scales, they could be cheaper than li-ion. This has cooled a lot since the lithium price spike collapsed.

. The only downside is well, Na is a bigger atom with more protons and neutrons and thus is heavier

Borderline irrelevant and not a driving factor. Lithium is only 2-3% of the mass of a li-ion cell, and even less of a complete pack. Also, counterintuitively, despite the larger atomic radius, they actually tend to have higher ionic conductivites.

Sodium ions being cheap chemistry is also easier to recycle

Once again for the people in the back: SODIUM ION IS NOT A SINGLE CHEMISTRY. What cathodes are you talking about? P2-type layered oxides? O3-type layered oxides? Which ones? NASICON? Fluorophosphates? Prussian Blue analogues? PBAs? What anodes are you talking about? Hard carbon? Tin-based? Antimony-based? Phosphorus-based? Bismuth-based? Titanium-based? What sort of electrolytes are you talking about? Organic? Which mixtures? Ionic liquids? Aqueous? Solid (NASICON? Beta-alumina)?

They are NOT a single chemistry, and do NOT have a single list of advantages / disadvantages.

Once again: No. "the" batteries are not in production. A type of sodium-ion battery linked is in production. There are many types of sodium ion batteries in various stages of development, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

And no, it is not a simple swap of sodium ions for intercalation rather than lithium ions. The chemistry involved is quite different. One of the biggest challenges is that sodium ions don't form very stable SEIs with traditional li-ion electrolytes.

The source is nontoxic clay.
The output is nontoxic clay.
The solution to the tailings is "put them back in the hole".

Anyone who makes some simple claim about "sodium-ion batteries are X" doesn't even know the start of what they're talking about.

Sodium-ion batteries are not a single chemistry. Each chemistry has its own advantages and disadvantages; they don't share a single set of properties. Heck, if there's any single most common advantages and disadvantages, it's ones almost nobody talks about: high diffusion rates and poor SEI formation.

The investment over the past several years on Na-ion was in large part a bet that lithium prices were going to stay super-high ('22-23 price spike), which should have been obvious to anyone that they wouldn't.

The simple fact is that you simply just don't need that much. A typical li-ion battery, despite the name, is only 2-3% lithium by mass. And lithium deposits are on the order of 1% lithium, give or take depending on the type and quality of deposit (salar and clay less, spodumene more).

He didn't just make geographically-ignorant comments, but also also didn't bother to read the paper, which had this picture as its cover.

It's a lithium clay in an enclosed hydrologic basin. Barren scrubland in the middle of nowhere. The extraction process involves digging up clay, running it through an extraction process (if an acid extraction, then followed by neutralization), and then put back from whence it came.

A typical EV only contains 5-10kg of lithium, and the clay at the adjacent Thacker Pass is ~0,3% lithium. It's really not much at all. And lithium is recycleable. Once again, for the people in the back: a clean energy economy involves way LESS mining than today's dirty-energy economy. And the mining involved tends to be much cleaner. The average ICE vehicle burns its entire mass in fuel every single year for ~20 years, 0% recycling on that oil. That oil is typically produced from sensitive or politically problematic locations around the world, and comes out of the ground carcinogenic, neurotoxic, hepatotoxic, renal toxic, etc etc, as an easily-spilled, highly-flammable liquid. But oh, no no, THAT's okay because we're used to polluting the hell out of our planet with THAT.

And for the record: lithium is neither rare nor expensive. Today, lithium carbonate (the primary traded form) is about $9/kg. We're talking less than the price of most cheese, nuts, meat, etc.

Cryptocurrencies were not designed to be theft-proof - that was not part of the threat model. In fact that would be antithetical to the goal of designing a non-reversible bearer token.

And "safeguarding the private key" - well, yeah, that's important, but that's hardly the only important thing. Cryptosystems leak for all sorts of reasons, and incompetence with keys is just one of many, many failure modes. Hell, that's just one of many failure modes considering only key management.

The claim "professionals" are making is that backdoors in cryptographic communications systems are user-agnostic, that there is no mathematical function that only returns true for "good guys".

I agree that argument doesn't go as far as some people want it to, but that has zero to do with the fact that people steal each others' shitcoins.

One implication of this is that if escrow or backdoors or whatever mechanism actually came in to play, access to the panty-sniffer systems should be logged to cryptographically verifiable audit histories tied to the users' identities. When Ossifer Friendly decides to start stalking his ex or listening in on his brother's business competitor, logs from the same system must contain sufficient legally verifiable information to trivially prove whether or not that panty-sniffing was performed in response to a valid warrant, and those logs should belong to a watchdog that reports to someone other than the cops. In a different country I'd say the courts, but in the US the courts really don't want to have that sort of role.

Certainly won't work for every coffee shop, but I saw an elegant compromise - a coffee shop I went to in Ohio a while back had a separate room for the office folks, rented by the hour with credits for buying stuff. I was curious about how they enforced it, and they said it was via Wifi timers - I would guess that's implemented through the DHCP lease, but am not sure. There were other details, like the coffee-shop side had loudish, energetic music and the office was quiet.

Obviously requires being in a space where that works, but I thought that was a good fix.

Automating their fuckups will save at least one salary, and robots are certainly more than capable of doing stupid things.

I'm not wasting my time talking to some ignorant fool who doesn't understand what the word 'Marxist' means.

See, that's the thing. I don't like seeing people suffer. And even if I did, we don't make the country a better place by shitting on each other and breaking each other's stuff.

I don't like a lot of what Xian churches teach people and give them permission-structures to do without guilt. That doesn't mean I want to burn them down.

I'm a fan of adversarial systems with rules. They have served us well. And I absolutely believe in smacking people who subvert those rules down, hard. But disagreeing about the right way to run things is simply politics, and being wrong about politics shouldn't mean you get enslaved to El Salvador OR have your kids' lives ruined.

We should be better than that.

This is just ongoing class warfare, nothing new.

A surprising number of people see kneecapping others kids as a way to increase the chances of their own. Most people who think this way won't say so in public, for obvious reasons, but I have heard it expressed more candidly from cultures who are more honest about class distinctions.

And then there are the "jerb creators", who don't want any of their poor people getting ideas about improving their station or worse, actually achieving financial stability. Southern US states explicitly pitch this when trying to lure companies in, along with "no unions".

The US government is trying to destroy the middle class. They want you poor, powerless and scared.

Dude reminds me of the Sacklers. He treats the rest of humanity as prey.

Luigi has admirers for a reason.

You can have a walled garden with Apple or Google. Just stay with their ecosystem. Forced walled gardens on hardware you bought are anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and should be illegal. If you want that, your choice is to buy whichever you want and just never install another app store.