They are working on it

"California Tops US EV Adoption: 25% EV Share Of Total Sales In H1 2023"

https://insideevs.com/news/688...

This story from a couple months ago says "Texas is the only state in the U.S. that generates more than a third of its electricity from wind and solar energy."

https://www.newsweek.com/texas...

And yet, electricity in Texas cost 11.36 cents / kWh vs 19.90 cents / kWh in California in Jan 2024.

https://www.electricchoice.com...

So where does that leave the idea that renewable energy must be very expensive?

Also I'm curious where 40 cents above came from.

I won't defend the wording of the headline, but it is an important threshold, because it's the point at which the conversion to renewable energy gets harder and more expensive.

As long as renewables are just cutting into demand for fossil fuels, you don't have to worry about storage / demand shaping / discarding energy. But now California has reached that point.

I think that occurred to the prosecution also:

Apart from three years in prison, Ahmed was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million "and a significant quantity of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to the Crypto Exchange and Nirvana in the amount of over $5 million," according to the prosecutors' press release.

Not sure whether he actually has all he stole +$5M, or if this constitutes a financial death sentence.

Where it exists, competition is the solution, as your experience indicates.

I hope some of this federal incentive is being used to grow competition.

Maybe we need to have a fiber network as a regulated infrastructure monopoly, and have competition for internet service over that infrastructure.

If you're happy about it, why? If Apple is pushed out of China, either by protectionism or simply cost, what do we gain by that?

Changing population and miles driven per person don't matter to their calculations because they are based on vehicle miles traveled:

Traffic flow data were obtained from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). (44) Data for 693 PeMS observation sites within the BEACO2N region of influence as of 2018 were included in our assessments. We calculated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as the product of the vehicle count at each PeMS site and the segment length to the next PeMS site...

For fVMT, the PEMS data set was used as a proxy for vehicle miles traveled in the region. (44) Preprocessing of the two data sets is described in Section 2.7. We conduct a simple multiple linear regression (MLR) to derive the coefficients m1, m2, m3, and c, using the posterior derived hourly anthropogenic emissions as emsanthro. The value of m1 was 2.3, which means about half of the observed seasonal trend is explained by the PG&E reported natural gas consumption. The constant emissions (c = econstant) were 156 tC/h. The term m2t + m3 can be factored out, and the rate at which this value changes over the 5-year study period is a reasonable proxy for the rate of change of overall vehicle fleet efficiency (average CO2 emissions per vehicle mile traveled).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10...

I'm not so sure a lower-tech strategy would have saved Germany. They simply didn't have enough men to keep sending wave after wave to die in battle, so they had to make the most of each soldier. Too bad for them they chose the strategy of invading in every direction and trying to occupy and hold millions of square miles - not something a small number of elite forces can do. The US doesn't have this goal.

Secondly, the WWII wunderwaffe was invented, but at Los Alamos. Beating us to the Atom Bomb and making even a few dozen really would have been a game changer. I hate to think of the British Isles. Could it have happened? The first paragraph of this reference has a nice long-list of people who probably would have been helping them instead of us, had Naziism not chosen to drive them away.

https://digitalrepository.unm....

True, that was the greatest wunderwaffe in all of history. No doubt it influenced, maybe distorted, our views.

It has been eye-opening as multiple waves of initially game-changing weapons seem to yield only a short-term advantage in Ukraine, as the other side adapts tactics and develops countermeasures.

If we have a major conflict anytime soon and our lead in stealth turns out to be not as big as thought or not very durable, and the F35 is quickly rendered vulnerable, we're going to be in a world of hurt.

Seems the Prime Directive must go hand-in-hand with the Reapers - any universal "rule" about non-interference would be practically nonexistent without enforcement against any who violate it.

I read the article just to see how it addresses this obvious objection, but it does not.

Almost everywhere in the article, you could replace the role of AI with nuclear weapons - it's basically just "what if technological development leads inevitably to self-annihilation." (And for now, nuclear weapons are a much stronger contender for this role than AI).

OK, but it's always the total picture of the tech and how well you operationalize it that matter.

My beef with complaining about the F117A is that it actually had a fantastic combat record. It completed thousands of combat sorties and only 1 was ever shot down. To call a platform garbage unless it can fight on the front lines without ever taking a single loss is simply absurd. Nobody would even think to apply the same standard to anything else.

The current status of "LAWS" (which, again, I just Googled) seems to be this: The US military doesn't (officially) field any of them right now, but they have no policy against doing so in the future,

Check this out, it's actually pretty interesitng

https://www.esd.whs.mil/portal...

True nothing can be 100% air power. But the Ukraine war would be a lot different if either side had air superiority. Well for that matter Russia does kind of have it now, with the ability to launch fairly cheap but hugely destructive guided glide bombs from out of Ukraine's reach. Unfortunately this seems to be tipping the balance in favor of the bad guys.

The only part humans really want to do is target designation, and are ok with machines doing the rest if they're reliable.

And I think a big caveat to "autonomous killing machine" is that a fighting autonomous machine isn't killing anything when it destroys an enemy machine. And there's nothing far-fetched about that. Let's say you have a drone that loiters and then shoots at any surface-to-air targeting radar that is switched on. Pretty soon the other side figures out it's better if their radar operators are working at a safe distance from the transmitter. So there can be a tactically-significant strike with nobody on either side dying.