Hmmm ... You seem to have missed the even more "interesting" followup studies. I was a grad student working with some of those reasearchers, so I heard a bit about it. They took their adult solo-raised monkeys, who were highly asocial, and caged them for a while with infant monkeys. After a few months, they took those individuals and put them in the "social" cages with established groups of their own species -- and they behaved like normal, socialized monkeys.

So maybe we could try this with our "deprived" human children. Put them into a social setting (perhaps schools) with younger children, and watch their interactions. They aren't monkeys, of course, but we are all close relatives, so maybe it would work with them, and they'd become at least somewhat better-socialized humans after a while.

Or maybe humans are hopeless. We don't really know until we do such experiments on ourselves. But we do seem to have a population of good test subjects, and the results couldn't be much worse than what we've been doing. Imprisoning such young adults in response to minor mischief would seem to be exactly the wrong thing to do, if those monkey experiments apply to our species, too.

Inequality is harmful when it persists without merit.

That is, the Walton family has made a lot of money from Wal-Mart, but the wealth of the youngest Waltons isn't money that they earned, it's money that came to them because of how they were born.

Sounds like a landed gentry, to me. I have zero problems with Warren Buffet being rich, but it seems unreasonable that his children would also be multi-multi-billionaires just because he made a lot of good decisions. And Buffet agrees with me, since he's giving away most of his money and leaving his children with a lot, but not much in comparison to the total value of his fortune.

The vastly wealthy horde money over generations, and the fact is that money begets money. If you have a million dollars and invest it in something that returns 7% a year, you can live off of that forever if you're careful. You don't have to work or do anything at all--money and markets do all the work for you. If you're a multi-millionaire, you've made some money by your efforts but far more because after you have a lot, the rest is easier to come by.

I dunno, it might make up for all the things they've used to kill people over the years. If they can make more money producing reactors than selling missiles that blow up people that have oil that we're fighting over, they'll save more people than they ever killed. Available fusion power suddenly makes all sorts of other problems moot because it suddenly doesn't matter how energetically expensive the process is, we'll just throw more reactors at it, and that solves a lot of resource issues in the world.

That's not true, the mAh levels of batteries keep rising as the batteries themselves shrink. And while there have indeed been some improvements in electronics efficiencies, these have been largely offset by increased demands in various roles.

Li-ion loses a negligible percentage of its energy as heat. A li-ion pack charged over the course of an hour or so is usually around 99% efficient. Surge charging can drop it to 94-97%, depending on the chemistry and rate, but again, li-ion is very efficient. Flywheels are much lossier. They're also more expensive, larger, and have more catastrophic failure modes.

Nope, can't do that.

High power chargers are DC straight into the pack. You don't get to choose the voltage. If you tried to run high voltage in the cable and a converter in the vehicle, one that'd be a massive converter, and two, cooling it would be a huge problem in its own right.

20KW would *melt* domestic feeds even before you get to the meter.

I don't know about you, but my new house is going to have a 100A feed. It's not that unusual. 100A * 240V = 24kW.

Secondly, ulltra-fast home charging rates are irrelevant. Seriously, in what scenario is that necessary? Home charging is for overnight. Fast chargers are only needed on highways.

This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.

There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.

And of course, the assumption that if your station's maximum output is 10 MW that you have to have a 10 MW feed to the grid is also wrong. It presumes that you can't have a battery buffer in your station. Look at your typical gas station; pumps spend by far most of their time idle. A charging station with a peak output of 10 MW could probably meet all its needs with a 2 MW feed and a 20-minute battery buffer (although a statistical analysis of consumption patterns would be required for specifics)

It's not at all reasonable to reharge the entire pack every 17.5 hours. If your car has a 200 mile range, and you're charging that fully every 17.5 hours, then you're driving 274 miles per day.

In a naive calculation, one can easily determine that the charging cable would be way too heavy and unwieldy for a person to use.

Of course, that's the problem with naive calculations. The solution in practice for very high power charging is very simple, just cool the cable rather than requiring it to be passively air-cooled.

Personally, I think very high-power chargers should also provide coolant for the vehicle, through the charging port. It makes a lot more sense to me to make a small number of chillers (aka, part of the chargers) which can keep a store of coolant than making every single vehicle have to haul around a high power chiller and coolant reservoir. Coolant comes from the charger's reservoir, along its switching electronics, down the cable, into the vehicle, into its pack, and then heated coolant is returned on the cable's return line

We can play this game until the correct horse battery staples come home.

Is it...

"Correct Horse Battery Staple"
"Correct horse battery staple"
"correct horse battery staple"
"CORRECT HORSE BATTERY STAPLE"
"CorrectHorseBatteryStaple"
"Correcthorsebatterystaple"
"correcthorsebatterystaple"
"CORRECT HORSE BATTERY STAPLE"

And that's assuming you remember four random words easier than a sentence that you chose because it has meaning to you, which is quite the assumption to make. Was it "Right mule charger tape"? "Proper stallion storage glue?" "Accurate mustang AA stapler?"

Trust me, I've used both types of passwords. The sentence one is much easier to memorize. And it's shorter, faster and more accurate to type.

Bad analogy. You're applying rules to make my version more complicated, you should apply rules to make yours more complicated also. So it's no longer "correct horse battery staple", it's "c@553kt!H0rS3;8ATT3Ry^5Ta7E". And damn well yes the former is easier to memorize.

Maybe we should be looking at the origins of the "common carrier" concept, and learn how they apply to the current situation. A number of historians have written on this topic, and the history definitely applies to our modern network.

Part of the explanation of how "common carrier" arose is in the well-known phrase "kill the messenger". Centuries ago, this was a very real problem. It wasn't unusual for a prince (or other powerful personage) to respond to the receipt of a message he didn't like by punishing the poor fellow who delivered it. The carrier services replied to this in about the only way they could: They opened and read the messages, and if they thought the recipient would react by harming their carrier, they would "edit" the message. And when dealing with a recipient who had a bad history, they'd often sell the message's content to the enemies of the sender or receiver.

Eventually the smarter princes figured out that a reliable message service was worth more than the temporary enjoyment they got from torturing or killing the messenger. So some of them got together with the message services, and worked out an agreement: If a sender and receiver had both signed on with a message company, they could send "sealed" messages, which the message carriers would promise to deliver unopened. But this would only apply if the sender and receiver had both promised not to damage the carriers employees or equipment, etc., etc.

This worked out to the advantage of the princes who joined in such agreements, so the practice spread, and became known (in English) by the phrase "common carrier".

It's easy to see how this all might apply to our current topic. The ISPs are "carriers", but not "common carriers". They have a record of opening and reading our communications, and selling the contents to "enemies" like marketers and government agencies. We're now engaged in collecting evidence about this behavior, and publishing it openly. We should make it clear that, as long as the ISPs continue acting in such perfidious ways, we will continue to work to expose their behavior to the general public, including people they views as their enemies (or "competitors";-).

The parallels to the original situation aren't exact, but we might benefit by knowing the history and trying to find a similar solution that can work today.

has had this one on the shelf, without disclosing it?