The parking orbit is 186 miles above the operational orbit, which was over 20,000 miles from the surface. The energy to get something back down from geosynchronous orbit is immense, so we instead move it a short ways out.

The charge/voltage curve on lithium ion batteries is super non-linear (voltage drops very little over most of the charge range before nose-diving), so there actually is a bit of smarts in the battery management to make a linear charge %. That said, I would assume that battery management is its own IC that ships the linearized charge % to the CPU for display, and even if the math is done in the CPU, the data would carry over an OS update just like wallpaper selection does.

I have found that if a device was left in a drawer for a long time, it takes a few battery cycles to get back again, but I'm not sure if that's the BMS forgetting the calibration data or just the curve changing due to damage from self-discharging to zero.

I think that there's also an element of distance traveled as well. I was going to be driving to a place that a friend would be flying to, so I brought their bag for them, which they keep an airtag in. I've spent many hours at their place near the bag, and never got the alert, but after the half-hour drive home I got an alert on my phone.

The frustrating element is that there doesn't appear to be a way to acknowledge a particular tag (just to turn off the warning feature altogether), so I had the alert come up whenever I was home for a week leading up to the meeting.

It's actually a beautiful piece of compromise: that derangement of initials was selected as the one that doesn't match the word order in English or French, so everyone is equally confused.

The trees were all made equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw.

I mean, we've had people doing exactly this to the nuclear industry for half a century now. What do those people say to their grandkids and great-grandkids?

I'm not saying they made the right design decision in this case, but there was an interesting piece recently on how the grid is restarted: https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w

It boils down to "dark start" infrastructure being expensive, so only some plants are set up for it. The investment should theoretically be best spent on making sure that power plants don't regularly fail for lack of outside power in the first place.

My understanding is that the Obama-era policy used a novel and somewhat extreme interpretation of "waters" to expand the EPA's authority into places it previously had not regulated. Regardless of one's opinion on the efficacy/necessity of the actual regulating they're doing, I think it's natural that there would be some trepidation about/resistance to expansion of government outside of the democratic process. The true will of the people is supposed to come from the legislature, not an executive branch "reinterpretation".

Which should be fine. In the aggregate, there's not a lot of rich people. If the average has to be 2 steaks a week and Warren Buffet wants to eat 7, finding 5 people from the middle class who are good with 1 steak and a check should be easy.

We already do this with housing, where the rich have large homes wasteful of land and materials. They supply a proportion of the residential tax base far and beyond the proportion of city services they consume. The longer supply chains of food should make equitable distribution of a meat tax easier as well.

The state? From the story, this sounds like it's a private company under license from the state. They probably pay a decent dividend to their guy at the DMV though.

Certainly the people holding Tether would be SOL, but even if their entire $68B market cap was backed by t-bills (making it less a run on a bank and more a one-time 100% dividend) and they had to sell in one day, it wouldn't really affect the market as a whole (the figure I found was that normal volume is >$500B/day).

You bring up a critical point here: we persecute drunk driving mainly because we have an accepted way to measure it (it also helps that there's a pre-existing puritan vilification of alcohol). Tired and distracted driving are just as bad, and probably more prevalent, but there's no roadside test for fatigue or a failing marriage. If we can leverage lanekeeping sensors to detect the actual problem (ie, reckless driving patterns), that would be a massive improvement.

The issue isn't the availability of the data, it's the normalization of using a database as a source of that information rather than a social interaction.

As an example, at my dentist they bring up my patient record before beginning a cleaning. Two of the items in there are that twenty years ago I passed out due to low blood sugar, and that in 2 visits in the past 3 years the hygenist didn't know how to clean around wisdom teeth and caused an infection. Because of the way the system presents the data, I'm always asked whether I've recently had a snack, but get an incredulous look when I ask that they take care with the wisdom teeth.

Once it becomes normal to read someone's profile before speaking to them, you're going to spend the rest of your life beginning every interaction by (trying to) explain that actually you're not interested in yoga, you just took a class once and The Algorithm latched onto it.

Came here to say this. How many loops of "cool convenient service -> annoying new feature -> evil now, but you're locked in" do we need to go through?

The public (decentralized) ledgers track things when Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc are being used as currencies. And that actually only tracks that A gave B coins; it doesn't say what B gave or did for A in exchange. No pricing information can be extracted from the blockchains' ledgers.

When used as a security (as they are in reality), the blockchain is largely uninvolved. These exchanges hold a pile of coins in a collection of wallets and then have their own (centralized) ledgers where they track their customers accounts. When you give them dollars/euros/etc for coins, they're just moving numbers in their own spreadsheet. Here, they're churning the numbers to make it look like there are more suckers than there actually are.

This is similar to how stock brokers work: when you give Charles Schwab an order to buy shares, unless it's an uncommonly traded stock they just shift a column in their spreadsheet of shares they already own and the public stock exchanges never see the trade. The difference here is that there's no impartial (well, less partial) NYSE/Nasdaq/etc to quote you a price; you only see the prices that the brokers say the coins are trading at.

The cost-plus idea is particularly silly in the case of SLS, which was sold as mostly re-use. It's basically an amalgamation of shuttle parts. The big R&D effort would have been building a production line for an expendable variant of the SSME, but they haven't actually done that yet.