LA has a freeze cycle. It could even be hours of freezing temperatures in some areas, sometimes....

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)

That's true. The problem you face, however, is that the social norm concerning creative works appears to be that it's perfectly okay for ordinary people to do things that constitute copyright infringement, at least if they aren't doing so for direct financial gain (i.e. if they aren't selling the copies). If the law were to reflect this social norm, copyright would not be as interesting an issue as it has become in the past 30-40 years. Instead we see copyright holders suing individuals, and trying to control the Internet so as to indirectly control individuals by limiting their options, so as to preserve the laws that enable a particular market, regardless of whether or not they conform to social norms.

And it looks as though even for a sort of infringement that most people would agree should be illegal, the copyright maximalist faction is still going overboard. I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important. Punishments should not be so draconian, especially given that it seems unlikely that it will accomplish a damn thing. A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward. For example, just as repealing Prohibition undercut the mafia, and just as drug legalization and decriminalization undercuts criminals in the drug trade, legalizing some copyright infringement by people acting not for profit, and thus able to act openly, could undercut professional infringers.

Well, I'd point out two things here. First, there are pre-existing incentives that act independently of copyright; in many cases, copyright is not the primary incentive, and in many cases copyright is not even a necessary incentive.

Second, I agree that copyright is useful, but we ought to regulate how much copyright we have, and for how long it lasts, with an eye toward its utility. I'd bet good money that adding a ten year sentence for certain copyright infringements, and even enforcing it, will have zero meaningful effects on how well copyright serves society. Therefore, such punishments are inappropriate. Indeed, we ought to pare copyright down to the point where it has both the fewest restrictions on the public with the greatest incentivizing effects. Given the economics of the various copyright-related fields, I think you'll find that this would involve no criminal punishments, minimal civil penalties, minimal restrictions on individuals, and copyright terms of far shorter length than we see now.

I don't think that's true. Sure, I know about the lifestyle of someone like Kim Dotcom, but he's something of an outlier. Benny Glover made some money, but I don't think you'd say it was a lot.

Making counterfeit anything, and selling it to someone who knows it's counterfeit, only makes sense if you sell it for a very substantial discount below the legitimate price. The negative effect on the legitimate supplier, if there's any at all, is going to be far greater than the positive effect for the counterfeiter.

There are other options besides this crap deal and war. But neither Obama nor you want to talk about them, because they'd make the president look like the fool* he is.

*and that's the most generous term applicable.

I think the weight thing might be a wash. There's a metric ton of stern drives out there with one and, over about 30', two V8 engines, often big blocks. With large fuel tanks, 100 gallons and sometimes more isn't uncommon. I think if you swapped a couple of Tesla power trains for a pair of 496 cu in gas engines and their gas tanks you might even be lighter than you started.

For the use case of a lot of freshwater recreational boating, 30 miles range might be perfect. A lot of people don't go very far or run their engines for long -- they run to a cove to anchor for the day, then back to a slip where there is often a 30A outlet. If all they need is 10-15 miles per day and 15 knots will do, I could see this working.

Even if you made it Chevy Volt style with a small generator capable of providing a partial recovery charge, it'd still be less gas intensive than a pair of big block V8s.

Electric motors would also make for some interesting propulsion options, like pod drives with the motor in the pod (basically scaling down what a lot of big diesel-electric ships use now) and without a lot of the mechanical linkage losses of a mechanical pod drive.

Marinas with covered slips could cover the slips with solar panels and make the electric generation a lot greener. 75 300 sq ft slips in a marina should be capable of a couple hundred killawatts of power.

You'd have to accept the more limited cruising ranges and speeds, but honestly I don't see a ton of Sea Ray express cruisers on inland lakes going wide open. I see most of them doing 10-15 knots for a couple of hours -- there simply isn't that far to go period due to the size of the body of water and a lot of boaters just go anchor anyway.

Maximum Plaid will actually be the highest speed offering of Tesla, in their newly planned new roadster which will come out in about 4 years

That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.

We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.

A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.

To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.

I find it amazing how much people obsess over the cost of production and disposal of a couple hundred pounds of the mass of an EV, and ignore the environmental cost of production and disposal of the rest of the bloody vehicle, both in the case of gasoline cars and EVs. Really, you think that ICE just popped out of the ground preformed? You think mining platinum for a catalytic converter or lead for a lead-acid starter battery is a harmless process? Lead is far more toxic than lithium.

1) Most lithium isn't "mined". It's produced from playas where you have a salt crust with briny water underneath. Evaporation ponds are set up on the surface (where it should be added no life more complicated than extremophile bacteria live, and whose surface is identical over vast stretches of land). The brine is pumped into the evaporation ponds to concentrate it and then the lithium salts are selectively crystalized out. The playas are seasonally flooded so there's no year-to-year water loss, and on some the entire top surface gets flooded out, resurfacing it. If you took down your hardware one year, all signs that you were ever there would be gone the next.

2) Lithium salts are relatively nontoxic. Some places actually bottle natural lithium-rich mineral waters and sell them as a health drink. The symptoms of consumption of lithium at below a toxic (high) level are feelings of calm and a reduced risk of suicide. Long-term consumption of lithium-rich water has been linked in one study to longer lifespan.

3) Contrary to popular myth, there are many places on Earth to get lithium. Afghanistan is not a major player, and is not likely to become a major player for a long, long time.

4) Contrary to popular myth, lithium salts are not expensive. They're so cheap that among the biggest consumers of lithium are glassware/glazing and greases.

5) Contrary to the name, lithium is not the largest, nor most expensive, component of lithium-ion batteries.

6) That "it's better not to junk an old guzzler" car is - you guessed it - also a myth. Which you should be able to figure out just from some extremely rudimentary analysis. The average US driver drives over 12k miles per year. If your car gets 24mpg then that's 500 gallons of gasoline, or 1400kg per year. Forget that most of a car's mass gets recycled at end of life, forget about the consequences of all of the oil leaks and the like caused by old decrepid cars - you burn your car's weight in gasoline every year. And the average car on the road is about 10 years old, meaning an average lifespan of 20 years.

I don't know where you're getting your "59-62%" figure from, it's usually higher than that. The US grid is about 93% efficient, generator-to-socket. Grid losses are far lower than most people give them credit for. Chargers are typically 92-94% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is. beyond the charger, charging is usually 90-99% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is and what sort of pack the vehicle has and pack management the vehicle does. Powertrains during operation (including battery losses) are usually 65-95% efficient, depending on torque and RPM conditions and the vehicle, with a usual operational average of 85%-ish. A small portion of the energy, depending on the type of driving, is returned via regenerative braking, which on li-ion EVs is usually 60-70% round trip efficiency (lower on NiMH hybrids). Ignoring regen, the whole picture is usually 70%-ish.

You're right about the efficiency of gasoline cars, but to be clear, it's not that the engine can't achieve higher - it's that maximum efficiency (usually 35%-ish) is confined to a narrow torque / rpm band. Gearshifting helps you pick your RPM / torque combination but you don't have control over power (the combination of the two) - that's dictated by the driving conditions. And then of course on top of that you have idling and no regen potential.

Concerning the production of electricity, it's important to note trends. Electricity is in most countries in the world, including the US, trending toward cleaner, both in regards to CO2 and to health-related pollutants. Gasoline, however, is trending toward dirtier - it involves more energy to extract and/or refine. There's no reason to expect these trends to reverse in the forseable future.

I was thinking about that the other day.

It'd be interesting to see a Tesla powertrain used to replace the engine on a stern drive. If you were willing to accept some limitations in top speed and cruising range, it might be viable. A lot of inland lakes boats don't actually go very far and return to a slip with power connections.

I think it would be a weight savings which might be used to add battery capacity. Boats often have big-block engines and large gas tanks -- 120 gallons of fuel is half a Tesla battery pack and the electric motors are likely lighter than the ancient GM blocks Mercury uses.

The only thing that would have to be kind of thoughtfully designed would be protection from water. An engine compartment flooded with water is a headache, but not always a disaster. An electric system like that would be a problem.

Haven't found a copy of the study yet but I did find this map supposedly from the paper, which already right there doesn't just wave red flags, it applies for a zoning permit to make a factory for automated red-flag-waving robots. Compare it to a map of coal power generation - they don't match up at all.

Without having the paper, I don't know what screwy thing they're doing with the data, but there's clearly something they're doing screwy with the data.

If you're pro-science and pro-facts then why are you citing a non-peer-reviewed paper?

Some people over on reddit are tearing into it just based on the preview.... I'm still looking for a fully copy.

Why are we dignifying it by calling it a "study"? It's not published in a journal. It's not undergone peer-review. It's a "working paper" on the NBER website. It's not the same thing. If it was legitimate, they would have submitted it to a legitimate journal and gotten it published. They have not, as it stands.

How long is it going to take for news sources to bother to check whether something has undergone peer-review before they start citing it as "science"? Let alone the "most comprehensive study yet"?

If your attorney is advising you to go find another job and more or less ignore this, he is not the right person to be representing you. You are aware of the extent of the issue and the potential ramifications. Find a firm that also understands that and you all can make significant amounts of money.

It's actually not bad advice, IMHO. I think a lot of good legal advice is to avoid legal conflicts if you can do it without meaningful damages. In this case, the guy could just find another client and move on.

Sure, he could sue "and make significant amounts of money". But is that significant amount of money really recouping real damages on his part or just a chance to cash in? Plus it also seems that when lawyers take cases on contingency fees or in class actions, nobody really makes money but the lawyers.

With any government entity, you're facing an opposition with basically unlimited resources to defend itself. There's also the chance that someone high up the food chain and influential was the source of this policy. Those people can be dangerous -- what if this guy finds himself under investigation for some past project? Sure, it'd be bogus, but now you're defending yourself, too. And then there's the risk of getting blackballed from more work in that sector.