Yes my ICE vehicles lose 15% range in winter. Partly from the cold in general, but also because of ethanol in the gasoline.

I'd say real-world EV experience in cold climates seems to show about a 1/3 decrease in range in cold climates, such as you'd find in Alberta, Sask, Manitoba, North Dakota, etc. Up in the northwest territories I have not heard any data but I would not be surprised to see 50% when it's -40 for any length of time.

As for towing, even ICE vehicle can lose significant range, so it's no suprised EVs would too. I have a pickup truck that fuel economy drops in half (or worse) with a large trailer.

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

This study found that *on average*, a majority of PHEV drivers in _Europe_ don't both plugging them in, making them no better than a "conventional non-plug-in" hybrid.

But as an individual PHEV owner, you can make it far better than this study says - simply by plugging in whenever possible.

I got a PHEV (the BMW i3, what BMW officially called "an electric vehicle with range extender) as my "entry into electric vehicles" - and in four years of ownership, I used maybe ten gallons of gasoline. And I'd say half of that was "burning it up just so it doesn't go stale". It prepared me to fully commit to battery-electric-only with my next vehicle.

What makes you think ssds are more reliable than spinning rust? Especially at data center scale?

I actually bought it quite recently, so I could take three bricks out of my laptop bag and replace them with just the one. Less space, less weight, and I love that built-in display. (it won't charge my watch unfortunately)

I've got a few spare older bricks from previous laptop purchases, so I can't say I'd need to buy a brick if my next laptop didn't come with one, but that shows my experience that bricks usually outlive their product. I also believe that most people have started accumulating unused bricks. (maybe it'll slightly lower the price of the next laptop I buy?)

Star Trek is definitely not community. It is post-scarcity. The idea of some sort of "post-scarcity" society is itself pretty unlikely, but the broader ideas of a prosperous free society where advanced technology is used to help people, better ourselves and explore the universe is very different than one where drones and self-driving cars are being used by cops for unclear purposes.

This seems like this is going too far in the other direction. The news is often very negative but that's because we don't have headlines like "Last month, more solar power was installed than any other week in history, again for the 40th month in a row." Similarly, many diseases that were death sentences a few years ago have with the advance of modern drugs been turned into manageable illnesses. Cystic fibrosis for example used to kill early almost everyone who has it. Now we have drugs which make people with it likely to have lifespans close to normal. Similarly, HIV invariably lead to AIDS and a functional death sentence within a few years. Modern HIV treatments give people with HIV life expectancies better than a typical person in the 1950s. Lots of positive things are happening even as lots of negative thing are happening also.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

I would much rather live in Star Trek than whatever cyberpunk dystopia we seem to be living in. Can the writers please change the genre a bit?

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

Then they'll find out the hard way that Steve was right.

Of all the jobs out there, CEO should be the easiest to replace with AI, and the most logical. If AI great, start at the top!

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

No oil? What are you talking about? Norway's economy has been powered by oil exports for years. They have so much they put the oil money in a big fund called Oljefondet (oil fund) which is now valued at $2 trillion! They wisely use all this money to invest in hydro and other renewables, and to push the EV transition. Very wise on their part. But make no mistake, their wealth came from oil!

I have CFLs that are 20 years old and going pretty strong. I've had better luck with CFLs than I do with LED for longevity. CFLs do have to warm up, but they are plenty bright and reasonably efficient. The increased efficiency of LEDs is quickly offset by the cost of replacing them when they burn out so frequently. LEDs can last nearly forever too, but not the way they are manufactured today with cheap components in the power supply and overdriving the LED crystals, sometimes by a factor of two. Big Clive does lots of videos about how to modify LED bulbs to emit less light but last way longer and run cooler.