A fuller quote makes clear that the biologists are very hesitant in delving into geology. As a geologist, I approve. I'm pretty hesitant on biology myself.

Although we cannot answer this question, we could speculate that at least the evolution of the B. bigelowii/ UCYN-A symbiosis is based on recent events in a geological timescale. For example, ocean conditions on Earth during the mid to late Cretaceous, such as a warm tropical surface ocean and global anoxia, together with the dominance of diazotrophic cyanobacteria and B. bigelowii species turning into a more phagotrophic strategy to survive and recover from the end-Cretaceous darkness period caused after the bolide impact on Earth, might have favored the encounter of N2 -fixers and eukaryotes. Accordingly, not only did the B. bigelowii/UCYN-A symbiosis originate ca. 91 mya, i.e., in the late Cretaceous, but also the origin of other marine (e.g., marine planktonic diatom diazotroph associations) and non-marine (e.g., plants with specialized root organs [nodules] where N 2-fixing bacteria are hosted) N2 -fixing symbioses have been dated to the Cretaceous period.

Their argument has a sensible event sequence, but there are a LOT of other plausible dates for it to have happened. To me, at least the considerable increase in biomass between the Neoproterozoic and the Ordovician suggests that there was a large increase in nitrogen fixation some time before the start of the Ordovician (so 450+ Myr B.P.), not just since the Late Cretaceous.

So when this [endosymbiotic fusion] is peer reviewed. And the experiment repeated.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody serious has claimed to observe the merger of an alpha-proteobacterium (IIRC) or a [I forget, some class of oxygenic photosynthesising bacterium] with some other class of bacterium to form respectively mitochondria or chloroplasts. That is what Lynn Margulis inferred to have happened in the early Proterozoic (twice, successively ; green plants have both chloroplasts and mitochondria).

all rational thought generally believes it happened at least 2 times before

Well, when Margulis proposed her endosymbiosis theory, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was derided as bullshit by a large proportion of the biological community. Funeral-by-funeral, the consensus has moved in her direction, but it is still a very new consensus.

Actually, Margulis has promoted the idea of around a half-dozen other symbioses in the same 2.5Gyr B.P. period. Which is not consensus yet. I was tempted, but dubious, of the idea when I met it several decades ago, and have moved the relevant book to my by-bed pile for re-reading. Don't hold your breath waiting though - it's not an important point to me.

Yet somehow now rationally thinking that it ever happens ever in a more or less permanent manner.

Cat got your "n"?

No one looks at the nucleus that way,

... for values of "no one" that includes Lynn Margulis (originator of the mitochondrial- and chloroplast- endosymbiosis hypothesis, in the late 1960s and early 1970s).

By coincidence, a mid-1980s text book she authored ("Five Kingdoms") recently made it's way back form a box in my cellar onto my bedside table, because I feel the need to re-read it. While I've lost my notes from first time round (device died ; hardware-linked software), I clearly remember her making exactly that claim about the origin of nuclei. Also, in almost the same breath, she proposed endosymbiotic origins for : the actin network that underlies muscles, cellular motility and the endoplasmic reticulum ; the Golgi apparatus ; flagellae ; the nucleolus ; and I think a couple of other types of organelle. This was, in fact precisely the point I wanted to check in the book, so I dug it out. (It's buried under 10cm of higher-priority reading though.)

When I read that assertion, a decade or three ago, I thought it worthy of note ; but I also thought that Margulis was in danger of becoming a "endosymbiosis solves everything" Cassandra-a-like.

I really need to go back to re-read what she actually said.

They're laying out their plans for up to the end of the decade. You think this is just a fraction of their NA plans, that they're hiding things from their giant "Look, We're Doing EVs!" press release?

The version of this story that I saw (outside America ; less concerned with USian politics) plotted the rates of people taking long-term contraception (vasectomies, tubal ligation ; not condoms or IUDs which are short-term contraceptives) against time - seeing a sharp increase from early 2022 to today, resulting in approximately a doubling of the number of vasectomies being performed in a little over a year, and a near-tripling of the number of female sterilisations over the same interval.

In a year, the population of the US has barely changed - not even 1%. So those absolute numbers might as well be rates/100,000 people.

Declare legislative war on pregnant women - which is what the US "penis politic" has done - and this is the predictable result. I'm sure your ultra-RW, women-hating politicians, male and female, have an explanation for why they are choosing to do this. Personally I read the headline and thought "... and the problem is ?"

Very much, it's a problem America's politicians have inflicted on the American populace and American economy (in years to come). From the rest of the world - a big fat [shrug].

TFS states that one of the outputs will be the "same material as seashells" - which as a geologist, I interpret as calcium carbonate (two minerals, multiple microstructures), calcium phosphate (several minerals, but much less common, because phosphate is frequently a limiting nutrient), or ... well that's about it, unless you're an insect and make a shell out of chitin.

So, where, in "sunlight, electricity and seawater are you going to find the calcium ions?

Obviously, they're relying on calcium already dissolved in their seawater.

Which is already maintained at quite low levels because there are petatonnes of coral reefs, seashells and the like already taking Ca++ ions out of seawater. They already have problems with falling seawater pH (so, increasing seawater acidity) making it harder for them to maintain their shells, leading to thinned shells, reduced growth rates, and decreasing mechanical strength of individual shells, and coral banks in aggregate. So I suspect that the ultimate utility of this approach is going to be very limited.

And now that the linked articles have opened in another tab ... the unquoted bits of the headline read : Some scientists are raising red flags. Yep. They're trying to perform some sleight of hand about separating the acidic and alkaline fluids produced (so, they're doing electrolysis. Meh. But where they get their calcium ions from in one side, and what rock they crush on the other hand ... I bet they're going to put limestone in on one side, double-count it, and use it to provide calcium ions on the other side. Which will lead, molecule for molecule, to one molecule of CO2 going in, and one molecule coming out. BFD.

Does the other link say anything? Nope, it's just hydrogen boilerplate.

This process will do precisely zero for net CO2 emissions, and at best will move some emissions from exhaust pipes to distant power plants.

Don't they teach chemistry at school these days?

Creating the training dataset is the *last* step. I have dozens of TB of raw data which I use to create training datasets that are only a few GB in size. Of which I'll have a large number sitting around at any point in time.

Take a translation task. I start with several hundred gigs of raw data. This inflates to a couple terabytes after I preprocess it into indexed matching pair datasets (for example, if you have an article that's published in N different languages, it becomes (N * N-1) language pairs - so, say, UN, World Bank, EU, etc multilingual document sets greatly inflate). I may have a couple different versions of this preprocessed data sitting around at any point in time. But once I have my indexed matching pair datasets, I'll weighted-sample only a relatively small subset of it - stressing higher-quality data over lower quality and trying to ensure a desired mix of languages.

But what I do is nothing compared to what these companies do. They're working with common crawl. It grows at a rate of 200-300 TB per month. But the vast majority of that isn't going to go into their dataset. It's going to be markup. Inapplicable file types. Duplicates. Junk. On and on. You have to whittle it down to the things that are actually relevant. And in your various processing stages you'll have significant duplication. Indeed, even the raw training files... I don't know about them, but I'm used to working with jsons, and that adds overhead on its own. Then during training there's various duplications created for the various processing stages - tokenization, patching with flash attention, and whatnot.

You also use a lot of disk space for your models. It's not just every version of the foundation you train (and your backups thereof) - and remember that enterprise models are hundreds of billions to trillions of FP16 parameters in their raw states - but especially the finetune. You can make a finetune in like a day or so; these can really add up.

Certainly disk space isn't as big of a cost as your GPUs and power. But it is a meaningful cost. As a hobbyist I use a RAID of 6 20TB drives and one of 2 4TB SSDs. But that's peanuts compared to what people working with common crawl and having hundreds of employees each working on their own training projects will be eating up in an enterprise environment.

Taiwan reinforces its silicon shield.

This is all to produce a peak of 240k EVs per year. Production "starts" in 2028. It takes years for a factory to hit full production. Let's be generous and say 2030.

Honda sold 1,3 million vehicles in the US alone last year - let alone all of North America, including both Canada and Mexico. If all those EVs were just for the US it'd be 18% of their sales, but for all of North America, significantly less.

In short, Honda thinks that in 2030 only maybe 1/7th to 1/8th of its North American sales will be EVs. This is a very pessimistic game plan.

It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

Well, when we have headlines from last week like this, I'm ready to give coal a hard deadline and fuck 'em if they can't meet it:

https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/west-virginia-says-no-to-biden-s-solar-panel-push-state-s-billionaire-coal-magnate-governor-vetoes-renewable-energy-bill-claiming-it-would-ve-put-miners-out-of-work/ar-BB1kE1oo

There is currenlty enough solar and wind projects queued up to more than double the entire US grid capacity, they're just waiting on interconnections. The processes used in the US for grid upkeep and upgrading are antiquated, laborious, and not geared for growth.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..