What else should one expect from all these red states?

More of this, please. The ongoing dilution of "racist" to the point of parody is improving our world.

Thermodynamics at work! While understanding the concept, the word somehow flusters you..

I think we've all come to hate this. However, this news is about one of the rare instances of the hype cycle ending in an actual product, so you're impotent rage is misplaced.

This isn't real. Sodium's curves are not dissimilar from lead-acid; a solved problem for decades now. The Sodium-Ion curve follows a straightforward, nearly linear drop. This is actually easier to deal with than Lithium's curve from a battery management perspective, but the truth is these are all solved problems today: you're flailing around, looking for rationalizations for your irrational hang ups.

You should stop. It's stupid, it won't pay any bills, and the productization of a legitimate solution won't be the least bit hindered by you and your made up issues.

Things have cost floors. You can't profitably make something below this floor, because even as the cost of your value-add approaches zero, the inputs still cost something: materials, electricity, etc. Lithium batteries, due to the volume of manufacturing and global competition, are approaching this point. However, despite the drop in prices over time, you can see it's leveling off in recent years. This is why. The same pattern is apparent is solar panels, displays, mobile phones, etc. All the things that are made in huge volume by aggressive competitors are driven towards some cost floor.

The batteries are made of materials approaching the cost of dirt. Like everything, sodium batteries also have some cost floor. But the floor is lower.

Right now, sodium is not substantially lower cost. That's because the volume is a small fraction of Lithium cell manufacturing: lower volume and less competition. As volume grows, and it will, because there are objective benefits for real applications, the cost will fall, and ultimately be lower than Lithium.

This is a win for everyone. All the Sodium battery hate seen here is deeply stupid. You'd think this place is full of Chinese Lithium battery manufacturers, which is about the only conceivable rationale I can imagine for this behavior.

SMR will not happen in the US. Nuscale's UAMPS project in Utah is an case study in why such hopes are futile. Costs escalate as regulators embiggen requirements around new designs, and pressure groups spawn like weeds to delay everything until the financing collapses.

What would it take? Two things: 1.) Deep pockets that can fully finance the project without bonds and shifting interest rates, all up front. 2.) Sincere and unwavering legislative support, including legal exceptions from state and federal regulatory sabotage and pressure group legal attacks.

The former is conceivable, but we're talking about someone committing $10B+ for ten or more years, and that's hard for anyone, even Big Tech monsters: Yes, there are trillion dollar companies, but like all such oversimplifications, they aren't so liquid they can easily just sink that kind of liquidity into a nuclear project. That's why they're grifting around, trying to wheedle deals with state government and regional utilities.

The latter is fiction: executive orders and other half measures are not sufficient. What would be sufficient is a bill, passed by the Federal government, signed by a president, capable of surviving challenges in front of SCOTUS, because it will go that far. That model has happened in the US in the past: TVA etc. Today, our leaders are balkanized around extreme pressure groups and vocal minorities, and no rationality is apparent any longer. The US isn't a place where things like this are feasible today.

They're out of money. Oracle is selling stuff to cover commitments that can't physically be built for businesses that are losing billions of dollars, all on spec. NVidia is certainly wealthy, but even their pockets aren't deep enough prop up all the tents. The VC money doesn't exist anymore: their capitalization is one full order of magnitude smaller than the latest plays, where ultra wealthy Big Tech companies are capitalizing their own customers with hundreds of billions of dollars.

They're out of power. All the low hanging power sources are tapped. Where spare power exists, it's surrounded by a hostile population (see Stargate Michigan, failing simultaneously on two fronts: pushback from citizens and finance.) They flailing around, talking about building nuclear reactors in Elon Time, which is never going to happen.

They're out of hardware. Stargate Abilene is never going to make its build-out schedule: it was supposed to be running in 2026, but it won't be complete till 2027 or later unless some alien spacecraft unloads thousands of pallets of GB200 racks at some point in the next few months. It is physically impossible to build and deploy that much hardware on this planet at this time. Meanwhile, costs of every type of silicon they need is skyrocketing, blowing out costs.

They're running out of smoke. The banks that are funding all this leverage are getting nervous, asking questions, and pushing back. Despite suspending their brains for the last few years, they can actually do math, and the math says that there isn't really as much money in all this as they've allowed themselves to be led to believe. OpenAI is enshittfying their product with ads trying to come up with a revenue source, because their product is already a commodity: it works, but it's also not difficult to make (there are multiple competitors at parity now,) and eventually it will be cheap. So these huge investments and build-outs aren't ever going to pay off.

That is you, peering through the moral relativism glasses you were trained to wear, and blessing Belarus with a benefit of the doubt where none is warranted.

The third possibility, instinctually omitted from your list, as per your training: It's another tyrannical kleptocracy, LARPing as a workers paradise, busily cleansing itself of anyone with slightly more wit than the average bear. That's why Pol Pot determined that anyone with prescription glasses was a threat: they'd likely spent some time reading things. That's why Soviets purged doctors, engineers and other other professional classes, in addition to his peasantry, his military, and his own party. The least bit of counter-narrative effort will reveal exactly the same travesties under Mao, and nearly every other commie bastard you might name.

Remember: you'd die at the end of a rope, dreaming of "free" healthcare. That's the plan they have for you. Once you accept that as the metaphysical certitude that it is, you won't find yourself in public forums, flailing around for comforting rationales to ease the minor panics these headlines induce in you.

Why? Is there something unusual about intellectuals in commie hell-holes getting liquidated? Or are you futilely hunting for some comfortable rationalization, because allowing yourself to imagine that such evil might actually exist, and endure, is too disturbing?

Here is an uncomplicated way to deal with these troubling feelings: understand that if you lived there, you too would get put against the wall. They would find some rationale for why you amount to an Enemy Of The People and liquidate you, just like this sorry mope.

Once you manage to get your tender mind wrapped around that reality, and ultimately correct your worldview to inculcate it, you'll find you have far less trouble understanding difficult cases like this.

That's not a bad idea. There are significant parts of movies I've re-watched a few times that I always skip. A few times I've revisited a series and watched only specific parts: Chernobyl and Mindhunter an example of this. There is a lot of potential in this idea.

This blanket statement is off the mark. Open source isn't one thing; there is a lot of good open source work that values quality and isn't being actively destroyed by political activists LARPing as hero developers.

It is. When you voice any preference for X11 you're a "fascist maggot." That's the official term, anyhow. There is a Xorg fork called Xlibre. It exists mostly because there are X11 fans that want to continue and improve X11, but also because Xorg, Gnome and many other projects (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Alpine... the list is long,) have descended into full-on purity spiral ban-hammer tyranny, removing en-masse (banned from forums, commit privileges, leadership positions, etc.) anyone not sufficiently committed to DEI. Xlibre is explicitly apolitical for this reason. Being apolitical is tantamount to Nasi-ism now.

Some amazing walls of text for something so conceptually simple: use CO2 to spin turbines instead of water. It is claimed CO2 does this with substantially higher efficiency. For certain, the turbines are much smaller for the same power, and CO2 doesn't corrode everything it comes in contact with.

It deserved a couple mentions, but yeah, this "new" story is just recycled montage. Same thing happened on YouTube this week: the now two months old story suddenly appeared in my feed as if new, except it was literally the same news clips from November and December.

I'd love to know who is pulling the strings on this puppet, because they appear to be running both YouTube and Slashdot, at least.

There do appear to be a suspicious number of "influencers" dropping the CashyOS name.

However, if it's a choice between the perpetual dominance of Windows, and CashyOS and whatever marketing spend they have finally causing Linux to break out and capture significant normy desktops, I go with the latter.

One very good reason to care is interest. The widely cited figure for 2024 was $880 billion of interest, so 103% of the entire DOD. Abject clown world interest figures.

Apparently, that's not enough, so we need experts to develop helpful new rationalizations for why we can go on racking up more, and fund all our fabulous schemes, like helping refugees invest in real-estate in the country they supposedly escaped from, because that's what our virtue requires of us.