My sister-in-law just traded in her Fiat 500 for a Hyundai Tucson. Because she and my brother were in an accident (not their fault) in my brother's bigger car, and is still recovering from her injuries. I fully understand. But I'll be driving my 2200 lb convertible as soon as the snow and salt is gone.

"High Speed Rail" has been defined as 85 MPH, and it's regulatory, more than practical. If you run your trains at more than 85 MPH, you have to update all your grade crossings so that they put the gates down a constant time from the train arriving at the crossing, rather than a constant distance. Steam trains would exceed 85 MPH at times in the 19th century. I believe the record is above 100 mph.

Last year, I bought a pack of Meross smart light bulbs, because NY Times Wirecutter said they were the choice to work with Apple’s HomeKit. The one bulb I installed worked great with Siri, but only for a little while. Once HomeKit could no longer see the device, you had to delete it and re-add it, which meant climbing up to the ceiling fan and removing the globe to get to the bulb to scan the QR code printed on the bulb. After it dropped the third time, I gave up and just use the Meross app to control it. Dimmimn, color, and color temperature are all controllable.

Home Automation has been promised for at least 11 years now (Apple introduced HomeKit in September 2014; not sure when Amazon opened their APIs to third party vendors). And for a lot of people, it doesn’t work better than old-fashioned power switches. Yes, home automation offers new features, you can control them from a distance, or with your voice. But they also have costs, in configuring, and repairing configurations, and obsolescence, that the preceding technology just didn’t have.

75-80% efficient. So 125-133 MWh electricity in, when there's surplus, and you get 100 MWh energy back out, when you need it.

It's closed loop, like the refrigerant in your refrigerator. After the CO2 is expanded, it gets stored in that big dome at atmospheric temperature and pressure. When surplus energy is needed, CO2 is pumped out of the dome and compressed. So the CO2 just goes back and forth between the high-pressure steel tanks, and the low pressure dome.

Here's a video by Matt Farrell https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGSzh8D8Of0k that explains the technology.
Efficiency is projected to be 75-80%, so you put in 250-267 MWh of energy, and get 200 MWh back out.

Congratulations to Blue Origin! This is an accomplishment, and the fact that there are now 2 partially-reusable launch systems available should be great news for companies that want to put payloads into orbit.

New Glenn is a much bigger rocket than Falcon 9, and bigger than even Falcon Heavy.

New Glenn is fueled by Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Methane, so the first stage won't have coking issues like Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. We will see whether this gives Blue Origin an advantage in turning-around and re-launching the booster.

And New Glenn has successfully launched payloads into orbit, something Starship has not done so far.

I put a solar roof on; started the process last summer, signed the papers by the end of September, about a 5 month delay from the local utility for permitting, completed in march. My bill has 3 parts: a fixed customer charge (~$20 per meter; I have 2), a delivery charge (about 7 cents per KWh), and a separate generation charge (also about 7 cents per KWh). I pay delivery and generation charges for every KWh that the utility sends me, so 14 cents per KWh, and if I generate more electricity than I'm using, I get a rebate on the generation charge.
This seems to me to be fair. It's as if I'm another electrical supplier, and for the energy I give back to the utility, I'm getting credits at the same rate as I'm paying. Which is, in theory, the wholesale rate for power.
Now I need to find a way to see in real time if I am sending electricity to the grid or taking electricity from it, and move as much of my shiftable consumption to times when I'm supplying, to avoid delivery charges.

I don't see any 2K screens here sold as TVs here in Ohio. 720p, 1080p, and 4K are the choices I see in the big-box stores. Haven't seen much 8K or 16K offered, but I bet those are in higher-end AV stores. I went with 43" 4K, which is as big as my walls will allow (windows and doors and bookcases, oh my!), and our viewing distance is just under 8 feet.

Do we have a gigantic budget deficit because of 2017's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act? That cut taxes, but didn't really create jobs? Shouldn't we find every way we can to increase revenue? Like hiring more IRS agents to go after wealthy tax cheats? Oh, no, we have to let those people go because we have to reduce spending. Cutting staff at National Parks, where the park brings in more revenue than it costs to run? Got to cut those positions, too, even though people will have a worse time, and maybe not spend as much.

We did have that. And then the Destruction of Governmental Effectiveness people went and laid off a big chunk of the staff at FDA and CDC and NIH, so now we won't have any new vaccines approved, because there is no staff to verify the results and approve them.

Reality keeps reinforcing Stephen Colbert’s observation that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Conservatives hate that, and think that by insisting that such liberal bias be countered with their viewpoints, even though they are not of the reality-based community.

I replaced my NetGear readyNAS with a Synology server a couple years back. ReadyNAS is no more. It looks like Synology isn’t to be trusted any more, either. Fewer and fewer choices.
And there are good reasons to buy a specialized device, rather than rolling your own. Power consumption, noise, and heat; a dedicated appliance is better on all three than building it yourself.

The mac always has a mouse and a mouse pointer; iOS has a touch-screen, and for those with a Magic Keyboard, also a cursor. So a Mac app on iOS with keyboard could be fully functional, but frustrating to users who are used to touch input. iOS apps on a Mac, though, won't have access to features that rely on touch input. I can see Mac laptops getting a touch screen, and then maybe have the touch screen detach from the keyboard, and become a convertible. But only if Apple sees the market for such a device (which could happen if Windows convertibles achieve a sizeable market share).

I bought an M3 MacBook Air last year after I got frustrated that I couldn't run an IDE on an iPad Pro. My iPad is aging, and has a cosmetic crack in the screen (now underneath a screen protector, but that trapped a visible mote of dust that's another annoyance). So a 13" M5 iPad Pro and Keyboard might be good enough that I could sell the MacBook Air, and travel with one device rather than two.