Well, and not only that, but the article itself clearly says that it was the tariffs that killed the company, not Lena Khan. So the headline looks a bit like it's just clickbait nonsense, and Lena Khan had nothing to do with this. Sure, if Amazon had acquired them, maybe they would have operated at an apparent loss in order to collect all that hot hot private home use data, but that would not have been a win.

The worry that iRobot would be acquired by Amazon was reason enough for me to disable my device—I hadn't actually heard that the merger was canceled, because I moved shortly after that and we sold the Robot so we wouldn't have to move with it. :/

I don't get the Rust hatred. C has implicitly had an "unsafe" mode for much longer than Rust.

If you're a C kernel developer, you can jump on the Rust bandwagon very easily: just put the keyword unsafe in your comments and you can write code just like Rust developers.

Maybe, just maybe, this mistake was caused by the fact that the same sort of people who are likely to write bugs into their code are the same types of people who prefer "safe" languages because understanding the subtle nuances of how computers work is difficult. They would prefer a system where they couldn't make mistakes, rather than a system where they had to understand the code and the machine to a high level. There's a place in the world for these sorts of people, but it's not in OS/kernel development. The sort of I-can't-make-mistakes-with-Rust mindset probably lulled the coder into a false sense of security, with the predictable outcome.

> We can argue over the number

No, I will not argue over objective facts. Sorry not sorry, your talking point are out of date.

> and why wouldn't you include taxes as that's what is paying for Energiewende?

Because taxes are policy and obscures the underlying true cost of the energy. Same is true for government subsidies, such as the ones France's nuclear power gets (which are also paid with taxes, but not taxes on the electricity, so it's even more hidden).
=Smidge=

If they'd developed the right type of nuclear, that is not necessarily true. During the MSRE, they actually shut the plant down every night, so yes, you can balance the grid with nuclear power. Germany chose to abandon nuclear based on really bad environmentalist input, though. IMO, it was like asking a fruit farmer for input on how to build a skyscraper.

> A reminder that Germany has spent over half a trillion Euros on Energiewende and still has one of the filthiest grids in Europe (>400g/kWh) and has among the highest electricity costs in the world

Your talking points are out of date. Germany's CO2 emissions have fallen to ~320g/kwh as of last year and not even *close* to the highest costs in the world. They're not even the highest cost in Europe until you include taxes... which are used to help fund the renewable buildout that's bringing emissions and overall costs down.

=Smidge=

I was a victim of studio misbehavior during the runup to GOD games changing this behavior. Publishers would force an NDA and no attribution, no credit clause. When you wanted to say I did this, I worked on this, you couldn't. Switched to business software because I was sick of being f***ed up the ass by the game and music industries. Basically, had to go into a job with zero experience with 5 years of experience. Yeah, f*you game industry. On that note, anyone need GLIDE 3D, lol. 3dfx joke, nVidia won that war.

Taiwan is effectively the rebels (Republican Forces) that defied Mao and the cultural revolution and where they fled when defeated. I'm not judging, but I didn't kill the most people ever by starvation of any regime because I hated sparrows. Thanks Mao, you win.

> The far more sensible way to view things when living in an infinite thermal bath of energy separated from absolute zero by a high value resistance is exergy defined as the available energy to do useful work.

We do not live in an infinite thermal bath of energy. It is, in fact, very very finite.

Exergy is based on the environment; Specifically, if you take some environment and bring the energy to equilibrium. This will be important in a bit, because you say a very dumb thing...

> Say the Carnot efficiency was maximized at 100C over room temperature of 300k, that would be 25% or 1-(300/400) because it penalizes you for the heat you got for free, the 300C

And there is the dumb thing.

You definitionally can not use any of the energy at 300C because that's your rejection temperature. You're not "using 100% of the heat energy you paid for" not only because you did not pay for the ambient heat, you have no mechanism in this scenario to move it to a lower temperature reservoir (and extract work from it) because it's already the lowest temperature in your system - by definition.

So yeah I guess "If you change the reality of the situation you can get different results" is technically true, but means nothing. You threw out the word 'exergy' (as if it was wholly unrelated to Carnot efficiency?!) and then quietly completely changed the parameters of the problem to do some bogus math. Exergy is about bringing a system's environment to equilibrium, and you tried to redefine the environment from a realistic and practical "Earth's surface" to a hypothetical "The entire universe."

> The earth has about 400k volts stored between its upper atmosphere and the ground where we live, with a net charge against true neutral of only a few volts making the surface voltage 200,000 or so. Your absolute electric car efficiency therefore goes from 200,800 volts to 200,000 volts never using the remaining potential to true neutrality.

For someone who claims to have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, I'd hope you'd have a better understanding that the Carnot Theorem only applies to heat engines and thermal gradients, not electromagnetic gradients.

Understanding that all voltages are relative, and that it makes no sense to use the average voltage between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface when evaluating anything other than discussing the voltage between the ionosphere and the Earths surface, is also something one should expect from someone with an advanced engineering degree.

> But thatâ(TM)s stupid because the current never flows to true neutral and canâ(TM)t flow to true neutral because of the giant resistor in the sky

It's stupid because even if it could flow from whatever the fuck "True neutral" is supposed to mean (midway point that is arbitrarily significant?), you're still dealing with a gradient that's tens of miles long but your car is only several feet high. Even if you created a conductive path to discharge the ionophere through your car, you'd still only get a fraction of a volt.

None of that is relevant here though, because you' don't use Carnot efficiency to describe something not operating with the flow of heat energy.

> So saying a thermodynamic process is effectively described in absolute terms by Carnot is just as silly as saying electric cars are less than 1% efficient.

Well no, because Carnot efficiency is a well established principle of thermodynamics - a direct consequence of the second law - that actually works in both theory and practice, and the electric car thing is some delusional bullshit you came up with. Big difference.
=Smidge=

> Porches aren't really daily driver cars
> Cayenne, Macan, Panamera, Taycan, 911, and the 718 Cayman and Boxster.

Four of the seven models listed are literally marketed as "daily drivers" and/or family cars.
=Smidge=

This is the end, my friend.

I was close to retirement anyway. There isn't going to be another generation of people with the skills I have outside of hobbyists. They're just not needed anymore.

My first year tuition was $1500 CAD in 1994.

By the time I had graduated it was up to $4000 or so. I think it's $8-9k now. Decent school, not elite, but engineering is still altruistic and it doesn't matter that much if you're skilled.

Bought me labor mobility to USA and would be worth doing at 10x the cost.

There are few circumstances where a liberal studies degree is going to give you a return of any kind.. and the library is free.

> Under the proposed changes, I'll pay per mile. 50 miles per gallon means I'm driving about 42.5 miles a day. So 42.5 miles * $.027 = $1.1475 tax a day. $1.1475 * 365 = $418.8375 a year. So for bothering to drive a hybrid (how dare I!!!) I'll go from $189.873 up to $418.837. $419 / 190 = 221% increase in gas tax.

Meanwhile you're not paying for roughly $2400/yr in gasoline. If you were driving a gasoline vehicle at a typical 30mpg, your 42.5 miles per day would burn about 1.42 gallons which, at a statewide average cost of $4.569/gal, is $6.47 per day, or $2362.55 per year.

Your annual fuel cost savings decreases from $2172.68 to $1943.71.

So did your have a point or are you just bitter your free ride might be slowing down a tiny bit?

> The asshole in the 20mpg tank won't notice a difference

The asshole getting 20mpg is already paying almost ten times what you would be under the proposed tax at $0.228/mi at current state average gas prices, and I disagree that they won't notice that jump ~12%.

> YAY I'm so happy to be green

I should hope so with an extra 2 grand in your pocket every year over the alternative. Also FYI those higher registration fees are there to make up for the gasoline prices you're already not paying, which is nearly double the tax you'd be paying at the pump otherwise.

"They dropped the cover charge and made admittance to the bar free! How DARE they charge more for drinks!"
=Smidge=
/AND you probably claimed a tax credit buying that vehicle...

> why vehicle weight doesn't get mentioned in their idea

It's because the difference between 3000 and 4000 lbs is practically negligible. Yeah it's a 4th power relationship, but 3000 to 4000 lbs is about 3x the wear rate and 3 multiplied by practically nothing is still practically nothing.

Not to say I'm against including weight as part of the tax calculation, because it would incentivize people using smaller vehicles which helps in a lot of other ways.
=Smidge=

If people trust Google to keep them anonymous (which I wouldn't), apartment complex reviews are gonna get a lot more spicy. As it is, you only get reviews from ex-residents and morons.

> These programs work well in intensely impoverished areas

[Citation needed]

I'm not saying you're wrong, or even that I disagree; But the catch here is that the places where this program presumably has the biggest impact are also the places where little to no data is available.

But also, if the OLPC are actually existing and being used... they have network connectivity. Presumably they need some form of internet to "give access to information that otherwise just wouldn't be there" if only intermittently or by proxy, which in turn should provide a way to collect usage statistics and/or track students in these hard to survey populations.

Either way you can't claim they work well in any population without actual data or reports to support that claim.
=Smidge=