Don't PG&E have a cheaper rate option overnight? The math on green generator+battery combos isn't so much selling the excess for buttons, but that you used your free, locally generated, capacity as much as possible during the daytime peak rates, with any excess going into the batteries, then topped off the batteries at the cheap rate each night. Any shortfall in your demand against local generating capacity during the day is then drawn from the batteries, so (system inefficiencies aside) you're basically getting cheap rate electicity during peak rate periods.

For my UK supplier, there's around £0.20 per kWh difference in the two rates, so every 5kWh of battery capacity saves me about a £1 per day. A decent 5kWh modular battery pack can be had for around £1,500 so, allowing for some inefficiencies, RoI is around 5 years, and the battery packs are often guaranteed to last for at least 10 years, with some allowance for capacity reduction - typically to less than 80% with that kind of daily cycle pattern. The practical capacity limit on stacking the modular batteries is how much charge you can get into each stack within the cheap rate window, but you can run and charge more than one array of batteries in parallel if you know what you're doing. We currenly have a little over 20kWh of batteries installed and even with a PHEV our bill is almost entirely based on the cheaper overnight rate, rather than the daytime peak rate.

Massive incentive for EV owners to soak up that excess at very little cost

My UK elec supplier has a specific tariff for exactly this. You give them access to control your charge point, plug your car in to charge and it'll charge up in the overnight cheap rate slot as normal, but with the added benefit that if they need to dump any excess capacity they'll turn on your charger and top up your EV batteries, plus any powerwall type batteries, for free (yes, really, "free" as in beer). They are, of course, getting paid some stipend by the grid operator for doing this, but the main thing is that it's avoiding wasting already generated capacity. You can obviously still override things and do a charge when ever you need to as well.

Or they could just spin up other mechanical things to sink the power; as you suggested, anything that can run part-time would do - producing hydrogen, desalination plants, carbon capture systems, pumping water up hill/heating salt for later energy recovery, hell, even mining crypto (ISTR someone looking into doing just this a few years back).

That's the crux of it. Does it really matter if about half of the movies produced each year are original screenplays when the overwhelming majority of that 50% are things like arthouse, foreign language, and budget productions that have a very limited amount of screentime, even less marketing, and only get shown on a small number of screens so the chances of the average movie goer finding out about it, let alone seeing it, are near zero? Cinemas are businesses after all, and if the latest Disney prequel/sequel/spinoff/remake in a franchise they've already been mining for decades has the better prospects of putting butts on seats, then that's what they're going to show.

While I'm sure a lot of those original movies are, in fact, total crap and deserve their obscurity, there are still going to be some diamonds in the rough - plenty of what are now regarded as classics (cult or otherwise) did not do well at the box office during their original runs. If you want more quality originality, then the problems you need to solve are finding those diamonds, and making the public at large aware that this is a movie they need to see so the cinemas provide the screentime, and that's something I'm sure producers of those movies have been working on since the days of silent movies and still don't have a solution for. I'm not holding my breath.

Only if those 20% have evolved to be much more capable of surviving subsequent bleaching events as well and are not just clinging on to life while in a severely weakend state. While the reality is likely to be somewhere in between, the other extreme - 80% of what remains dying off every 14 months - would mean that we're very rapidly going to be into percentages of surviving coral on a par with the active ingredients in homeopathic remedies. Corals have had a long time to evolve defences against natural bleaching events, which has mostly worked or they'd be extinct already, but it's far from certain that evolution will be able to keep pace with the rate of increasing temperature levels and number of events we're now seeing.

There's also the habitat loss angle to consider. They're probably singling out two of the worst case species here, or maybe these are just being monitored more closely because they are already endangered, but when coral colonies collapse they take a lot of other species in the area that depend on them down too rendering the entire area largely sterile compared to before the collapse. That's not good at all as it leads to a general reduction is biodiversity which can take a lot longer to recover from, if it happens at all, and the implications of that could easily reverberate up the food chain until it starts to impact our already dwindling oceanic food supply.

Operator of the launch vehicle pays - they're the one directly requiring the ATC support - and it's up to them how they pass any costs downstream to their customers. The operator with the most competetive overll option - which, at least nine times out of ten, will be the bottom line - wins.

That's how the free market the US adores is supposed to work, yes? This seems like a pretty good way of levelling the playing field, as long as everyone is on the same charge sheet - no exceptions.

Keep in mind it doesn't need to be a viable shipping route for the entire year, just long enough to get the cable onto the sea bed at a depth that won't freeze solid and potentially damage the cable. if you're making multiple landfalls then you wouldn't even have to lay the entire cable in one go if time is a concern; you could use the landing stations to splice on the next length prior to laying it once the ice cap has melted again the following spring/summer. It's still very expensive, yes, but for lucrative latency critical stuff like high frequency trading, since when has a high up-front cost been a concern?

That said, I totally agree with the sentiment that this kind of opportunity is one that, all things considered, might be better if it were not even potentially on the table.

"Now" would be the best era to simulate if that is somehow integral to the reason the simulation is being run in the first place. To use one contemporary example of a problem, perhaps the developers are facing a climate disaster and are running billions of AI simulations to figure out a strategy to both get the population onboard with the eventual plan and figure viable out technical solutions. Or maybe they're trying to solve multiple problems in the same world and we're all just AI bots in a glorified ChatGPT. A less specific example might be that they are just trying to solve the Fermi Paradox through simulating how countless civilization models develop and deal with - or fail to deal with - various existential threats.

Alternatively, what's to say this is the only era being simulated? Maybe "reality" is just one option in an MMORPG version of "Westworld", where players get to pick different eras with their own challenges and quests to undertake, and nearly everyone is just an NPC bots spun up in to populate "Early 21st Century" world? That would certainly explain why some people seem to be as dumb as rocks and/or stuck on repeat... :-)

Keep in mind that if you are in such a simulation, then you'd have no way of knowing when in your history (or "backstory") those behind the model hit "Run", or how many iterations of the model you've already been through before they hit "Reset".

And the link to Tucson.com, mentioning the idea of the potential law, is dated Jan 15th 2024...

Still, dates can be faked, although I suspect this is just someone using a most likely dead-in-the-water idea to add a bit more credence to the gag. Look at the bill though; Title 41, Chapter 4.1, Section 41-860.0. That's either a huge clue, a huge coincidence, or someone in the Arizona State Legislate is wearing a huge grin today.

Not necessarily. He's clearly dodging around some kind of issue with posting the NYC bond, other the quite reasonable not wanting to tie up cash or liquidate assets he probably won't be able to recover if he should prevail on appeal, because it doesn't all need to come from one place, or bond provider. He can use a combination of cash, stocks, and other assets, spread across multiple bond providers to get to the total. That almost certainly results in a higher total amount lost in fees, but it's better than nothing. The DWAC stock could be used as collateral, to be returned as stock if he prevails, and only used to make up a shortfall of anything else he can use - cash, stocks, assets, whatever, with other bond providers to get to the total.

Besides, DWAC is mostly financed by Trump backers and a lot of the stock will probably be sold to other true believers. Anyone else buying in at IPO is almost certainly hoping the price will immediately spike so they can quickly bail and make a truck load of cash while leaving someone else holding the bag, just like any other IPO. Given that, Trump could only hold one share, and the chances are still pretty reasonable that if he said "Jump!" most of the board and the stockholders are going to ask "How high?"

Of course it's a grift; many of the backers of DWAC are also quite vocal Trump supporters, and the prospective market for this IPO - and potential bagholders if/when it all goes south - is almost certainly the MAGA crowd, and especially Truth Social users. The over valuation is quite likely driven in part by that backing of Trump and in part that the hope that general population of the MAGA movement will somehow be tapped for a steady stream of actual cash, rather than the over-inflated paper value of the stock, and that's where the profit comes from even if the stock listing drops into the pinksheets before they can dump it. I guess you could also see this as a way to indirectly support his current political aspirations and even help with the mounting legal bills too.

Interesting point on the later bit. Apparently, DWAC shareholders cannot divest shares until at least six months after the IPO, unless there's an exemption. Trump will own more than half the stock and needs a lot of cash to appeal the NYC court ruling much sooner than that. There's a theory I saw that Trump can't use his properties as a bond for the appeal because the issuing insurer(s) would want an independant valuation, which would then be shared with the court - essentially not only confirming his guilt if he has indeed over-inflated their value, but by exactly how much. Cashing out a lot of his Truth Social stock ASAP would get him out of that problem, so watch this space on that exemption. If granted, that'll tell you all you need to know about how above board all this is, assuming the ticker isn't already enough for you.

Even those with a passing belief in the Area 51 Alien Conspiracy are definitely not going to take this as total and gospel truth, to be certain, but this is also a lot more plausible than "swamp gas and weather balloons". Most of the depictions of UFOs from the 60s onwards are of wedge shaped objects, rather than the "flying saucers" of early SciFi, and usually based on sightings by rural USians - exactly the kind of low-population density areas you're going to be running test flights of classified aircraft over.

The Avro Vulcan delta-wing bomber was already a design concept by the late 40s and first flew in the early 50s, the Lockheed A-12 (the CIA's precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird/Habu) first flew in 1963, and they were followed by the SR-71, F-117A Nighthawk, and B2 Spirit, and various other X-planes like the X-47B, mostly with swept, full-delta, or other unusual wing configurations, as well as the almost impossible seeming manouvering capabilities of vectored thrust aircraft like the F-22 and F-35. Compare those with the profiles and manouvering abilities from UFO sightings years, and in some cases decades, after they first officially flew, and it's extremely likely that most of the sightings were, in fact, just next gen aircraft or their prototypes under test, especially when things like the extreme operating altitudes some of them reach are taken into account.

That might not explain things like the "Tic-Tac" just yet, but with next gen piloted and autonamous aircraft probably still under wraps, I wouldn't be at all surprised if most of the current UFO sightings turn out to have a remarkably similar profile to next gen fighter aircraft/drones or hypersonic payload delivery systems when they eventually get declassified.

Absolutely no usage cases for where you don't want to share the contents of the screen with others, although a simple snap-on cover would solve that and give you at least the option of sharing the screen (and allow for an after-market in replacement/custom cover designs). As long as you don't include text on what you're sharing, because it's going to be mirror writing from one side or the other depending on how you draw the screen, you're good.

Here's a possible usage case though. Assuming a traditional clamshell design with a slim base and keyboard with illuminated key lettering, fold the screen flat against the keyboard, turn off the keyboard LEDs, and you've got a conventional, if slightly bulky, tablet without the need for a complicated and fragile hinge that lets you turn the screen through 180deg like current hybrids. If the screen is touch sensitive and it includes a stylus, I can see that might appeal to at least some graphic artists or people looking to do some light work or reading while they're commuting, yet still have a traditional laptop available once they arrive.

Or almost any publication reporting on finance, for that matter. Take a look at the "News" section on Google or Yahoo! finance pages for a few stocks, indexes, or (for a real laugh at the chutzpah of blatently biased reporting) crypto tokens; there's occassionally some interesting stories about the stock/index/whatever you're looking at, but mostly they're full of shitty articles that are almost always trying to push the same buttons as those TFS is accusing CNBC of, or are outright hyperbole that I suspect is almost certainly produced by some second rate GPT type tool given how similar the summaries read. Articles by Forbes on BitCoin are particularly laughable in that respect; the one-line strap you see on Google/Yahoo is almost always claiming some multi-trillion dollar "earthquake" that's several times larger than total market cap of all crypto tokens, let alone BTC. They're not targetting people with above average IQs or levels common sense here, that's for sure!

IMHO, it's all utter crap, produced either because they put some GPT to work and are not checking the output (or don't care that it sucks), and/or is deliberately designed to generate clicks and FOMO. In some cases, I suspect it may even be going one step further and trying to help pump the price and sucker rubes in so those pulling the strings can boost their profits when they sell to those rubes looking to get in on the action before they miss out.

This. I recall a Flash video from back in the day that showed the relative scale of things in the universe, from the largest known cosmic structures like galaxy clusters, right down through macroscopic/human scale stuff, to the smallest known sub-atomic particles. All that was pretty well populated, with known objects present at almost every order of magnitude. However, if you continued zooming in there was then... nothing. Many, many orders of magnitude with nothing known at that scale until you arrived at the Planck length and hypothetical "fabric of the universe" type stuff.

It seems highly unlikely there's absolutely nothing there, but the kind of equipment we'd need to explore that far down into the foundations of the universe is way, way, beyond anything we might even dream of today. While this proposed collider might get us a few more orders of magnitude down from the LHC, there is still clearly a *looong* way down still to go beyond it's capabilities. You've got to start somewhere though, and that knowledge can then drive the designs for the next generation. Or maybe we could just cut to the chase and sub-contract the construction job out to the Magratheans?

Let's say they use bleach or some such that kills "99.99% of known germs dead", rather than just quickly rinse them or, $deity forbid, have gone directly from the cubicle/urinal to the hand dryer. That still leaves .01% to liberate and blow around. Per user.