Precisely. This is more telling about the mindset of a certain kind of executive (sadly not an infrequent mindset) than it is about anything economic.

In addition to the obvious product quality issues, another problem that happens in lightly regulated industries is that companies just pull out or disappear with little notice. It's one thing if you can no longer get your favorite pair of designer jeans, and quite another if an airplane part manufacturer hangs it up.

Regulation is a blunt instrument for sure, and regulatory capture is real. But if you're going to look at the downsides of having regulation then it's important to realistically look at the downsides of not having regulation. That's why I think the much more interesting conversation is how to regulate better.

Funny you mention engine swaps, I actually was looking at converting an 1987 BMW to electric. Since I know almost nothing about working on cars, I am confident that my DIY timeline would be years to never.

I generally agree with you that the tradeoff for non-swappable batteries in phones is not that good. Let's assume, for sake of argument, that a non-swappable battery could achieve 20% longer battery life than a swappable one (which I think is likely a very generous overestimate). Having a swappable battery that gives that phone an extra 2 years of life seems to me to be easily worth trading that much loss of battery. Especially because within a year or two you'll likely lose 20% of battery life to degradation anyway. I used to swap the battery on my Galaxy S9 and newer Galaxy phones don't really allow that. I presumed it was for water resistance purposes, and I'm not really willing to try to wade through the various layers of teardown to try to swap the battery now.

With EVs, I'd guestimate that the tradeoffs are far worse. Even if it was only 20% less battery, that reduction in range would make the car significantly less useful. And when your phone dies unexpected, it most cases you can easily get it charged enough to make it usable again - not really so with an EV.

That may be true, time will tell.
However, it's entirely possible that it would've died a slow death anyway because it is likely facing the same problems as Facebook in growing or even sustaining its user base.
I don't think Reddit was that short on cash but I also can't see any world where it made its VCs a lot of money.
I think this whole kerfuffle is about investors looking for the exits. The buzz has moved on to AI and Reddit missed its big chance to monetize around that. Whatever spez actually thinks or feels, the investors do not care what happens once they're out.

If that's true - and this would neither be the first time Musk has stretched the truth nor that a social media company has stretched its metrics - clicks don't play the bills advertisers do, and their ad revenue has tanked. They weren't profitable without massive LBO debt and now they have less revenue and big debt service.
And to date nobody has built a social media unicorn on subscriptions.
I'll take the short position on Twitter, thanks.

If I could mod this up I sure would. Musk's Twitter acquisition easily kept to the top of the list of dumb LBOs. Even if he had not fired a lot of their best tech and moderation talent, and had not taken a piss on brand safety, Twitter would be staggering under its debt load.
Their infrastructure may or may not degrade to the point of unusability in the next year or two, but unless they can renegotiate their debt I think they may have trouble just keeping people paid and data centers running.
The best take I've read (www.readmargins.com) is that Musk depended on Twitter for his merged personal/Tesla brand, and was genuinely worried that the SEC would shut off his account.

Successful LBOs usually involve someone who really understands the industry and a clear opportunity to capture value that the target is well positioned to go after.
Twitter was only barely starting to creep toward profitability and nobody that I know has identified what value it is uniquely positioned to capture.

I think part of the reason reddit is doing what they're doing is that the Twitter fiasco left their VCs spooked and out of patience now that it's obvious that there's no more megagrowth to be had in social media. The API changes are meant to support some bs revenue protections that their I-bankers can shop around to credulous IPO buyers. They don't care about what happens with the communities because they will be long gone.

As a non-Slack user that's my basic problem with Slack channels as well.
They're a stream of conversation but because there isn't really a conversation thread I find it hard to use retrospectively.

The other problem is that this means that the batteries cannot be integrated closely with the car - they have to maintain compatibility with the charging chassis.

There are a number of auto manufacturers who are working on reducing weight by having the case of each cell or module also play a structural role. At the moment, since range is gating factor for cars, the value of weight optimization dramatically outweighs the value of being able to swap out a cell or module. That's of course totally incompatible with swapping.

Similarly, the manufacturer can optimize the cells for power delivery under various scenarios, cooling, power architecture, etc - while measuring the performance impact on a particularly vehicle. Requiring the entire battery assembly to be compatible with swapping interface greatly limits this kind of optimization.

The fact that swappable batteries have not caught on for phones is due to the same factors, and as stated above, nobody wants to trade their battery for one whose state is unclear.

Yeah, I got a pretty solid whiff of that from his blog posts.

He is definitely hyping the alien thing - he describes some of the microscopic particles (which he calls spherules to sound more exotic) as looking like an alien emoji. That's ridiculous and a way to draw in the credulous.

This sounds more like SEO and clickbait trolling than any sort of scientific assessment.

This is a great point. It feels to me like a chapter of the internet is closing before our eyes. Sites like Twitter and Reddit were built on the community spirit of the early internet but had consolidated a the traffic and content into a centralized platform. It seems to totally elude the tech bros who are currently running these companies that the community spirit is the primary thing that makes the site worth going to.

Community stuff is rewarding but also a giant pain in the ass - if you've ever been to a government hearing, a PTA meeting, or even a soccer team listserv you know that dealing with community is full of difficult interactions with difficult people. So it's not like the mods or the 10% of users that make most of the content are ever going to be easy to deal with, nor is figuring out how to monetize that activity all that easy.

I'd bet that Reddit is facing intense pressure from its investors to give them an exit. Those investors look at Twitter and see that nobody had a financial model that would sustain the site without destroying the community and understand that the same problem applies to Reddit. MetaFace quietly pivoted from being a community content site to being a user tracking and profiling business and built that up in time to become a duopoly with Google. Reddit is too late to claw out a piece of the user profiling business. I'd bet the investors want to create a metrics-based story about growth that they can sell to Wall Street Analysts to hype the IPO and cash out on the backs of less tech-focused investors.

What you are talking about entails running the business for sustainability instead of growth. VCs don't do that, and people like /spez in that circle are living in that VC mindset or may still be drinking the late 90s/early aughts Kool-Aid that they can marry a community-oriented site with hypergrowth.

I'd guess the site will look like Tumblr within a couple years. I don't really see a centralized alternative emerging in the near term. It may bring traffic back to Slashdot though.

The problem with carbon offsets is that they essentially rely on a counterfactual - what would have been done absent the implementation of whatever mechanism is used by the offset.
Attribution of carbon emissions to a particular end use is itself more art than science - also involving a lot of assumptions and counterfactuals.

Put these two together and you have in carbon offset a product where it's almost impossible to know if it is actually working - i.e. did any net change in carbon emissions occur at all - in the best of circumstances. On top of that there is supposed to be some sort of valuation of this.

One benefit of a well-design carbon tax would be to cut through all this hocus-pocus of attribution and simply price emissions directly. I'm not sure I'll see a real carbon tax in my lifetime, notwithstanding the need and likely efficacy.

IMHO any general scheme that purports to measure carbon reductions should favor measuring and incentivizing activities and choices the end user makes directly over complex attributions of carbon.

This is an interesting point.

One thing that strikes me about the renewable energy conversation is that if any fraction of these new energy initiatives work, we will have a lot more energy available at a lower price. I say lower price because it seems the likelihood of raising the price of carbon-emitting energy sources is relatively low at this point, so new options will almost certainly have to be priced lower to be competitive. And since (non-baseload) solar and wind are already below the cost of fossil fuels for electricity generation, any new electrical generation will also be competing with that. Heating might be a different story, but it's still hard to see widespread carbon pricing happening in the short term.

I can imagine in a decade or two we will be awash in cheap energy. I wonder if anyone has thought through the consequences of that.

You need a better definition of density.

For example, with respect to heat energy, having production concentrated in a point source is not especially helpful because heat is so much harder to transport long distances than other forms of energy. So for distributed heat generation, geothermal seems to be a much better answer. It is "dense" in the sense that a great deal of heat energy can be produce in a small space.
This is important because a large fraction of total energy usage is in the form of heat. Electricity can be used for moderate-temperature heating needs (e.g. home and residential HVAC) but to use it for high-temperature industrial uses incurs a lot of overhead, frequently lossy.

In theory nuclear could supply heat energy, but the security issues of siting other facilities right next to nuclear plants limit its utility for that.

I think nuclear could have a valuable role, but it's hardly the only new source of energy worth pursuing as part of decarbonization.

And they still do it inside Gmail and generic Google search. Every link listed goes to a Google address and is then redirected to the destination URL.

Not that I think this gets Microsoft off the hook, but given how much traffic originates through Google search this seems like a small piece of a larger privacy problem.

I use DuckDuckGo and I don't think most of its content is powered by Bing - just a few things.

When you search using Bing you get rather different results than DuckDuckGo. It could still be the case that DuckDuckGo uses some of Bing's crawl results, which IMO are distinctly less complete than Google's. DuckDuckGo seems to have a much harder time with most recent version of some piece of information. Sometimes that is actually useful but often it is quite irritating. And Bing's relevance has always seemed much worse than Google's to me.

I also read that there was some hole in the "don't track you" shtick because Microsoft insisted on doing some sort of tracking in order to expose LinkedIn results through DuckDuckGo.

Interestingly, DuckDuckGo is using Apple Maps for map searches -only time I've ever seen Apple Maps available outside of the iOS ecosystem. You can get a Google Maps link from DuckDuckGo if you look for it but the default is Apple Maps. AFAICT Microsoft doesn't seem to expose Bing maps through search very much, not even Bing. Strange.

Overall in switching off of Google (mainly for privacy reasons) I have been surprised how useful it is to see a different set of results for a given search term. It just shows you that relevance is often pretty arbitrary, and you as the user can benefit from getting something different than whatever Google ranks highest and/or whatever SEO games made the content appear first. That fact makes me very nervous that chat-based search will just compound the problems that people are getting rather arbitrarily selected information as "the answer" to an ill-formed question.

The thing is that in most male-dominated industries there *is* a lot of sexism, making awfully hard to address the question that you're posing in any sort of independent way.

It's also pretty hard to evaluate a counterfactual - male-dominated industries without sexism - without first going through the process of reducing sexism in various male-dominated industries.

There's also another dimension, which is that the exclusion of women often (though not always) tends to go hand-in-hand with "there's a right way to do things and we know what it is" and women (both as biologically different and as newcomers/outsiders) don't fit into "the right way to do things".

The "we know the right way way" mentality is quite often the enemy of innovation. So while it's not always the case that addressing sexism makes the industry more innovative, it is not uncommon for that to happen either.