I think that must be a west coast thing. Here east of the mississippi, I haven't seen a problem with broken chargers.

300K! Why, that's... eighty degrees F.

Hot enough to melt metals like... mercury.

A little hotter and it will even melt gallium!

Tesla should just fix its website so people can change their address without using a phone.

Sounds like UPS needs the accent-fixing AI described in TFA.

They don't mean a password reset on your laptop.

They're talk'n about resetting a forgotten password at a bank or other financial institution. You often need to call and undergo an interrogation to confirm your identity.

There's no reason an AI can't do that at least as well as a human.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

A Pew Research poll last year found that 42% of Republicans are in favor of legalizing recreational pot. 72% of Democrats are in favor.

Pew poll on legalizing marjijuana

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

Those things did not exist in a practical sense until after 1940-1950. Even television only had a 1% U.S. adoption rate in 1948.

But before any of those things we had high quality prints available for centuries at affordable prices, and then there was player piano reels and radio and phonograph records. Which does take us up to the 1940-1950 period.

No, they're not. As I already pointed out (a year ago,) plug-in hybrids can conceivably zero out fossil fuel use for the bulk of passenger vehicle travel. The ICE engines in these vehicles are extremely efficient, as well: they don't need to operate over the extreme range of pure ICE vehicle engines, so their real world thermal efficiency is significantly better.

But do carry on with your nonsense. The market doesn't care and isn't listening to you.

I knew we would get here. The sales trend was obvious as much as three years ago, but only if you aren't a pie-eyed EV advocate that can't tolerate any anti-EV facts.

There are genuinely good hybrid products available now in every segment of the market, from compact to medium trucks. Government Motors, however, can always be relied on to go full establishment group-think, so now they're caught out again, playing catch up.

I'm curious how you peel off marketing at a company that is really playing two, perhaps three, entirely different games of it in parallel; some of which are actually closely aligned with real techical work.

There's the consumer facing stuff; 'intel inside' stickers and sponsoring overclocking influencers and whatnot. Probably aligns with some poking at engine and middleware vendors to make sure that the characteristics Intel adds to their chips are catered to, whether that be new instructions or not behaving pathologically on heterogeneous cores; but it's not obvious that terribly close coordination would be needed; and (while I sincerely doubt that Accenture will end up being good value) it's easiest to imagine a more weakly coupled consumer marketing effort off doing its thing.

The marketing to low-information institutional buyers (like the now-infamous slide deck about "hey howdy purchasing managers; did you know that sometimes Core i3 is newer and better even though Ryzen 5 has bigger number; which seem unpossible?) is presumably also viable to farm out in its most basic form; but presumably requires some fairly detailed(and potentially contentious, since those have their own interests to look after) coordination with the PC OEMs unless they just want it to be some slightly goofy talking points for dealing with people who buy computers the same way they buy commodity reagents and paper towels.

The marketing to higher-information institutional customers seems like it would lean heavily technical pretty quickly. There's some lightweight stuff aimed at IT director Bob who remembers when he 'knew computers' hands on 30 years ago and continues to read about it at a high-ish level in industry trade magazines and whitepapers; but it fairly quickly gets somewhat meatier in terms of the OEM and ISV assisting/cajoling required to ensure that the vague sense that nobody ever got fired for specifying Intel, the compatible and validated high performance solution for your critical business requirements, remains at least reasonably true; and gets straight into inserting real engineers to talk to other people's real engineers in order to get what you want from emerging OCP specs; ensure that QAT and AES-NI and such are considered relevant to networking performance, that telcos with vRAN problems actually consider AVX to be a part of the solution; and so on. Maybe you can peel off the part that's just faff and vibes for IT Director Bob; but it seems like people would notice if Intel's OCP people were replaced by random Accenture dudes.

Finally you've got the relationship with the OEMs; which definitely has some pure marketing stuff(like the various 'incentives' for advertising OEM systems if they were intel based); but in large part(especially if Intel actually wants to make money, not just discount their way into volume) relies on some largely technical things being true: "we can supply the complete, mature, solution for a thin-and-light from consumer to enterprise; while AMD is busy trying to munge shit together with Mediatek and ASMedia and Realtek" is a simple enough marketing message; but its continued viability can only be sustained by charisma for so long: it has to actually bet true that your CPU/iGPU is at least acceptable enough to not scuttle sales; that your CNVio2 wifi saves money, or is at least a wash, vs. the competitor's m.2 PCIe while being as good or better; that an intel i219 or i225 will be dead reliable and allow AMT enablement for the corporate buyers while AMD is messing around with Realtek's DASH firmware; that the OEM will get actual engineering support if Intel Smart Sound Technology isn't or if they need to deal with some ACPI fuckery that is ruining battery life. It's not like there would be no marketing people involved in spreading the message; but that seems like something more or less wholly inseparable(without drastic damage) from internal, relatively core, technical teams.

Obviously, in a trivial sense, you can always farm something out in the sense of paying someone else to pay people to do things rather than just paying those same people to do those same things directly; but unless your payroll and HR departments are fucked up beyond words you are unlikely to save money by just adding that sort of intermediary; so presumably they have something more in mind. I'm just not sure how it is supposed to work.

If you are just doing low-information vibes marketing that seems pretty readily farmed out; but that's also the sort of thing that is(or ought to be) comparatively cheap; while the more valuable and compelling marketing messages pretty quickly move to being direct technical commitments in a way that seems like it would be an awkward jump if your marketing is external but your engineering remains internal.

No, you don't.

When I got my EV, I was thinking that we'd use my car for running around town-- 90% of all driving in the US is only a few miles from home-- and when we took long road trips we'd use her Prius. But once we got used to it, we liked the EV even for long trips. The requirement to stop and recharge every four hours or so was a good chance to get out and hit the bathroom, stretch our legs, eat lunch, etc.

But, yeah, if you really need to do frequent long road trips on a schedule where fifteen minute stops are too long, sure, use the ICE vehicle.

Except actual use experience shows that in fact used EVs don't have shit battery life. That was a big worry when EVs started getting popular twenty years ago, but battery capacity loss turned out to be a lot less than the worst-case scenarios people worried about back then. Used EVs still get pretty good range.

It seems kinda stupid to use voice for that at all.

A text-based interface on a website would make far more sense.