Who needs people to fight wars when you've got robots? "China’s armed forces are testing humanoid robots against combat requirements and studying how the machines might fight alongside soldiers." -- MSN
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process. (We have one pure-EV and one ICE car (non-plug-in hybrid, but that's just ICE with extra equipment for marginal efficiency gains), because the cars have different use cases that they're good at. I'm very happy for the EV companies to tell me how much better EVs are than ICE cars; I'm also happy for ICE car companies to tell me how much better their cars are than EVs.)
It’s not like you can squash only PR campaigns that you happen to be misaligned with, so If you want your own biases to be able to communicated, you have to let others do the same.
> Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
I wouldn't care, because environmental groups aren't destroying the planet and covering it up (see also the article you're commenting on: "New Documents Add to Evidence in Climate Deception Case Against ExxonMobil").
> If you want your own biases to be able to communicated
Wanting to know if you're being lied to isn't a "bias".
I suspect that 38 years from now, future versions of us will look negatively upon Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club's opposition to fission reactors for electrical power generation, whether as a transitional approach to reducing fossil fuel combustion or longer-term base load generation, and there exists today at least one internal memo/email suggesting that their anti-nuclear policies are harmful to the environment. (Some current versions of us are looking negatively at that, but not all.)
Makes perfect sense to me. When starting the shortest path for a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, you don't point the plane toward Japan, you point it towards Alaska.
Indeed, ideally you'd point it at the only path that is pointing straight towards Japan. No other path actually points towards Japan (except the one going in the opposite direction, but that's longer).
The Earth's upper atmosphere is delicate. It's already being disturbed with rocket fuel residue and particulate space junk. Vacuuming up air and ionizing it risks putting the upper atmosphere even more out of balance.
They had 59 votes from Democrats for the public option, not single payer. Public option is to let people choose either a non-profit government insurance plan or private insurers. They needed 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster. Joe Lieberman (Ind-CT) said he would filibuster the public option but would vote for the ACA without it.
Whoops, good correction, I did misremember public option versus single-payer, and I guess technically Liberman was not a Democrat at that point, but he had been for a while up until shortly before then and still had committee chair positions from the Democrat leadership, so it mostly feels like a distinction without a difference.
I still think this is an important historical detail that seems to go under the radar a lot; if anything, it gives me yet another reason to disdain the filibuster!
Interesting this earthquake struck shortly after a solar eclipse, implying significant spring tide forces were present. The earthquake occurred near dawn, when the sun/moon pair, Indonesia, and the Earth's core formed a right angle to each other, creating tidal tension forces on the crust.
Tidal forces have been linked to the Dec. 26, 2004 Sumatra earthquake. This paper claims there's a significant link between tidal forces and earthquakes in the region (https://doi.org/10.1029/2006GL027074). The authors conclude "The observed relationships suggest that the cyclical crustal flexing, which will be at a maximum at full or new moons, might provide sufficient extra force to a plate-boundary region already on the point of rupture to trigger an earthquake that was ‘waiting to happen’."
California has huge amounts of excess renewable generation nearly every day, especially in spring and fall. Last April the grid operator curtailed 1.47 million MW/hrs of renewables, or about 2 GW per day. That's excess power the grid did not accept due to no demand. (source: https://www.caiso.com/documents/key-statistics-jul-2026.pdf)
In my mind the ideal solution is in addition to daily BESS time-shifting is seasonal time-shifting: long term storage of April excess for use in July.
Is this curtailment due to overproduction, curtailment due to inadequate _grid_ capacity, or some mixture? In Ireland there's now a _lot_ of curtailment, but it's mostly driven by inadequate grid capacity (wind power in particular expanded quicker than the grid could).
I think you had me until you mentioned long term storage. How do you store significant amounts of energy across seasons? I'm just not aware of anything other than pumped hydro power that has anywhere near the cap as capacity to do such a thing.
AI, when used in an organized and structured way, is excellent for learning a language. For example:
1. Ask AI for the 10 most commonly used verbs in ordinary daily speech in language X.
2. Prompt AI: generate 4 short sentences for each of the 10 verbs at the A1 (beginner) level. Provide the sentences in .csv format compatible with the Anki flash card program.
3. Import .csv into Anki. Study your 40 cards.
As you advance you can do much more like having conversations with AI avatars, transcribing videos, translating text, generating audio clips, and so on.
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