"Major cities are already mandating EV-ready installs in new builds and funding curbside and shared charging. You’re describing a temporary rollout delay like it’s divine prophecy. Spoiler: it’s not."

Where the fuck is that power going to come from if the power plants aren't being built?

Curbside charging? Have you ever met a fucking meth addict before? That station will be GONE.

"There isn’t?! Are you high, or just deeply incurious? Walmart. Target. Kroger. Whole Foods. Safeway. Meijer. Literally hundreds of grocery locations across the country have chargers."

Not a single one of those in my area has chargers - instead that space is for delivery pickup. This is southern California.

"The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $7.5 billion for EV charging. States are installing fast chargers right now. Companies like GM and Ford are building gigafactories, signing Lithium deals, and deploying networks. This isn’t hypothetical—it’s a national retooling effort in real time."

No it isn't, when the very first fucking thing you need to consider (and has not been when you read the plans) is baseload generation, which is not being built out for anything except AI bullshit.

" Infrastructure money is already flowing. Projects are already breaking ground. But I get it—it’s easier to predict failure than to acknowledge progress you haven’t bothered to Google."

Actually, as someone that does contract geology work - I've been to those ground breakings. Nothing's happened afterwards. Do you know how long it takes to actually prepare land to make a suitable building site? Hint: 6 months minimum, and that is under conditions so favorable as to basically not be able to be found since the 18th century, as any area with such conditions has already been settled upon. Now days, you're looking at a year minimum for settling after laying pipe and power, IF you're doing things right. See: Florida for plenty of abject sinkhole failures caused by neglectful rapid construction practice.

Don't get me started on the western Brightline track to Vegas - that's an abject failure in the making, and that's supposed to be HELPFUL distance transport.

"You “guarantee” it? That’s adorable."

Pay attention to the leaders in the market - Toyota. they started the Hybrid train - they're moving away from it. They came up with just in time lean manufacturing, they're moving away from it. When Toyota sees the writing on the wall, you should likely listen.

But i'd bet top fucking dollar you don't work in this industry in any capacity - I do. I design the lighting systems you find in modern ICE and EVs. I'm pretty knee-fucking-deep in the mess. Meanwhile, your ass is saying to Google shit. I tell you, sir, get your fucking ass in the industry and educate yourself before you spout off.

You are proposing scientists terraform the Earth -- something we're centuries, if not millennia from knowing how to do.

Take a single cubic meter of dirt from your back yard. That is practically a world in itself, far beyond the capabilities of current science to understand. That's because there are millions of organisms, and thousands of species interacting there and billions of chemical interactions per second. Of the microbes, only about 1% of the species can be cultured and studied in a lab, the rest are referred to as "microbial dark matter" -- stuff we can infer is there but have no ability to study directly. If you gave scientists a cubic meter of ground up mineral matter that was completely inorganic, they would be unable to "terraform" it into soil like you get from your yard -- not without using ready made soil like a sourdough starter.

Terraforming as a sci-fi trope is 1940s and 50s authors imagining the obsolete land management practices of the time -- "reclaiming" (filling) wetlands, introducing "desirable" species, re-engineering watersheds like the ones feeding the Aral Sea -- then scaling them up to planetary scale. The truth is we can't even terraform a bucket of dirt yet; an entire planet is as far beyond our scientific capabilities at present as faster than light travel.

In any case "beneficial" microbes you're talking about are already out there. The problem is that conditions are changing to allow "detrimental" microbes to outcompete them. And there's a 99% chance the microbes in question are microbial dark matter that we can't effectively study. Maybe we need a Moon shot program to understand microbial dark matter. Chances are such a program would pay for itself in economic spinoffs. But I don't see any new major scientific initiatives in the current political climate.

You are quite possibly correct.

83.3% of the U.S. lives in urban areas, so if 20% of the country can't charge at home, then if you assume 100% of the 16.7% can, at most 20/83.3 or 24% of urban dwellers who own EVs can't charge at home.

But this isn't a complete picture. Those numbers come from a survey of existing EV drivers, and don't include any of the people who bought non-EVs.

If we use California as a benchmark, where roughly 25% of people bought EVs, and if we assume that EV buying percentages are similar in urban areas (this is just a guess, but it seems likely to be higher in urban areas, so this is still probably a pretty safe lower bound), then all that we can say for certain is that at least 19% of people have the ability to charge at home.

In other words, the 86% number tells us very little without knowing something about the 75% who did not buy an EV, beyond that the real number is (probably) between 19% and 86%.

But not an employee. They'd be hiring people for their BRAAAAAAAAAINS. BRAAAAAAAINS.

I think this is true only if you are comparing the LCOE of natural gas to solar *with storage* in the US. A plain solar farm without storage is going to be cheaper. We really should look at both with and without storage, because they're both valid comparisons for different purposes, although PV + storage is probably the best for an apples-to-apples comparison.

The cost of solar has come down year after year for the last thirty years, to the point that *internationally*, at least, the LCOE for solar PV plus storage is now just a little bit less than the LCOE for natural gas, and is expected to become *dramatically* cheaper by the end of this decade, according to IEA. Even if they are calculating somewhat optimistically, if solar costs continue to drop it's only a matter or time before solar PV plus storage becomes cheaper than natural gas, even in the US with its cheaper gas.

The wild card here is any political actions taken to change the direction this situation is going. Internationally, low PV prices are driven by cheap Chinese suppliers, and it doesn't seem likely we'll see large scale US domestic solar production in the next five years. In the meantime we have an unstable situation with respect to tariffs on PV components and lithium for batteries. Until sufficient domestic sources of lithium come on line, uncertainty about tariffs will create financial problems for US manufacturers and projects.

Poor form. They and their families might object and make trouble for you. What you do is convince them to throw *themselves* into the furnace, in fact to feel rather smug about it up until the actual burning happens.

Even if it is in the title, it doesn't matter. If you've ever tried Amazon's search, you know that searching for multiple terms is pretty much hopeless. Short of it being a checkbox in the UI, you can safely assume it won't work. And you're also assuming people even know to search for "MFi" instead of "made for iPhone" which will almost certainly return every cable with "iPhone" in the name, because Amazon search doesn't require search terms to be nearby, doesn't have a way to reliably search for phrases, and mostly just looks for listings that have at least one of your search terms and sorts by what gives Amazon the highest profit margin, as far as I can tell.

It's hard enough to search Amazon for functionality that you can't live without, much less something nice-to-have like a certification.

Also, I suspect that if you surveyed people, you'd find that MFi is about as unimportant to most buyers as "UL Listed", and for the same reason. Sleazy companies put bogus certifications on products on Amazon all the time. I trust "MFi" in the product title or description exactly as far as I can throw the person who manufactured the cable. If it isn't a major brand, it is probably junk.

Belkin is well-known because they were around making products for the Mac when Apple was still beleaguered — low-quality products with terrible quality control, in my limited experience (two devices out of two — one of which was a USB device that shorted out my motherboard when I plugged it in, the other of which was a Wi-Fi base station that kept freezing up), but the mere fact that their name has been out there for so long makes them a trusted brand in people's minds.

My first experience was in probably late 2000 or early 2001, before the Apple retail stores even existed. I got to know them because they sold them in MacMall and the other Mac-centric online stores. And I immediately stopped buying their products after the first one nearly took out my computer. A decade later, I bought the Wi-Fi access point because it was the only one they had at Wal-Mart, and regretted that, too. I have since bought a couple of other things from them that did work, so I guess their QC has improved.

But I do agree that their tendency to build Apple-specific products sets them apart and makes them more popular. Whether the store specifically is a factor or not, I couldn't say, but presumably to some degree.

Anker, not so much. Anker's products first appeared in Apple stores in 2019, but their products were quite popular for nearly a decade before that, largely because of Amazon.

Anker is well-known in part because they have a history of building products that work reliably, comply with the USB-C spec, and are at the cutting edge of technology. They were one of the earliest companies to come up with chargers that could reliably charge Android and iOS devices at their maximum charge speed before USB-C made that easy. They were one of the first companies to build gallium-nitrate-based chargers, which offer much higher wattage per unit of volume, which means their chargers were smaller than everybody else's for a while, and a lot of people bought them because of that. And so on.

Apple brought them into the store because they were already popular, and they were popular because they were one of the best. Apple probably contributed to increased sales, but that's true for any additional sales channel.

We mostly abandoned the idea of fast breeder reactors out of fear that they could be used to create more weapons-grade plutonium, for non-proliferation reasons. Also, concerns about the need for waste reprocessing and the complexity of doing that on-site or the cost and safety and security risk of doing it off-site. I'm not saying it isn't a nice idea in theory, but in practice, there's still a *lot* of politics involved in why those aren't being built, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.

What we *could* plausibly get approved include newer traditional generation IV designs with passive nuclear safety. Also maybe small modular reactors, pebble bed reactors (a category which IIRC overlaps with SMRs, but are not all SMRs), etc.

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting Russia doesn't have reactors. I was suggesting that Russia's current government would give us one only if it would cause us harm, e.g. picking up Chernobyl and dropping the radioactive carcass somewhere in the continental U.S., and then snarkily implying that the war in Ukraine was really about stealing Chernobyl so that they could give it to us. :-)

The problem with the Republican party is that they are their own worst enemy, not thinking things through before they open their mouths and propose solutions to problems.

For example, the reason modern nuclear power plants aren't available in the U.S. is largely because modern designs haven't been approved by the NRC. Why haven't they been approved? Budget cuts that the Republicans insisted on. So now to fix what they screwed up, they'll rip out the regulations and leave us with a risk of dangerous, poorly validated reactors being designed. And when they melt down, they'll bail out the companies that caused it so that they don't pay the cost of their screw ups. And in the end, the American public gets f**ked. Every time. Let's hope if it happens that people remember exactly which party led them there.

All you have to do to fix the burden of overregulation is give the relevant departments enough resources to A. regulate properly and B. occasionally ask Congress to clear out the regulations that no longer make sense. But that second one has to come from the agencies themselves, from the bottom up. As soon as you try to deregulate from the top down, it is almost always a mistake. And deregulating as a workaround for inadequate regulatory staffing is doubly so.

They'd have to steal it from Ukraine first.

Ah. I assumed the pads were what made them interesting, and that the disks were just metal disks. So it's actually the disks that are carbon-ceramic. My bad. I'm assuming that like metal disks, you can turn them and reuse them once before you scrap them?

Either way, my last brake job with normal metal disks was something like $1500, so we're still probably talking about a factor of four to six, which is a decent chunk of change, but not remotely significant compared with the total cost of the car. Amd yeah, you could scrap the whole car, but every other car you could buy that would only cost you single-digit thousands is going to have brakes that will be on their last leg, too, so that won't help all that much.

The molecular basis for epigenetics was discovered in the 1980s and for the past thirty years or so non-genome-based inheritance has been a pretty hot scientific topic.

This only seems surprising because for most of us our biology education ends with 1953, when the structure of DNA was discovered. We didn't learn about epigenetics (1980s) or retroviruses (1970s) or horizontal gene transfer (discovered in the 20s but importance was only realized in the 90s).. The biological world is full of weird, mind-blowing stuff most people never heard of.

The ethics module is largely missing in humans too.

Philosophical ethics and ethical behavior are only loosely related -- rather like narrative memory and procedural memory they're two different things. People don't ponder what their subscribed philosophy says is right before they act, they do what feels ethically comfortable to them. In my experience ethical principles come into play *after* the fact, to rationalize a choice made without a priori reference to those principles.

Nobody paid for it. At least nobody was charged directly. It's customary to cite grants funding research in any resulting papers, and in the case of *federal* grants it's *mandatory*. The authors simply thank the Cornell Center for Material Research for use of their rheometer and SEM. The equipment in the CCMR was purchased with NSF money, so I guess public money spent for whatever the wear-and-tear is for taking some rheometer measurements and SEM images.

If you look at the paper, it's not *really* an investigation into cutting onions. To do that you could just line people up to cut onions and have them report on the experience. It's really more about how to use experimental fluid dynamics to investigate a problem. Scientists noodle about such toy problems all the time. I had a professor back in the 80s who worked on the problem of the equation of motion of a spinning coin on a tabletop. Nobody paid him to do that, unless you count his MIT salary. The solution was eventually found by an Oxford researcher and published in a letter in Nature in 2000-- again this appears to be un-funded research. And as trivial (practically, not mathematically) as the spinning coin problem appears to be, the paper has subsequently been cited by a fair number of physics research papers, so *practically trivial* isn't the same as scientifically pointless.

So you can unclutch your pearls now. The scientists didn't pick your pocket to do a stupid experiment.

There's actually a solid history to show that being a late adopter isn't always a bad thing. There's clearly some value in LLMs, but at this point most of what we are hearing is speculative hype intended to kite stock prices. Basically a ponzi scheme.

I'm sure that some value will drop out of this in the end. I am not at all sure what it will look like, except, probably not much like what the hucksters are promoting.

When things are clearer, it will make sense to invest. Right now, it's probably best to let other people burn cash. Particularly since one of the things they're doing is completely destroying copyright law, so when they're done, we can just copy whatever they did with impunity.