Mask Culture has become so ingrained in some people I fear it will be permanent. In that sense also, Covid will never truly be over because it will live on in some minds forever.

You say it like it's a bad thing. It's only civilised to go around with a mask when you have the sniffles, especially in closed public areas where you could spread it. Maybe future generations will regard us, who grew up going around bare-faced when we had a contagious disease, with the same disdain we reserve for the court of Versailles, where the nobles casually shat on the floor because there were no toilets.

I think people are most irritated by the fact that their database (the actual hard work) is user-generated, and paying 20 bucks a month for what amounts to a barcode scanner (of which there are hundreds free in any app store) is outrageous.

This company is not asking 20 bucks a month for their work or for actual costs they sustain. They are simply trying to gate in data their users gathered for free for them, counting that there will be enough lazy rich people to establish a sufficient revenue stream.

Considering their pricing ($20 a month, $80 a year, i.e. like 4 months) they probably expect this run to last a very short time before someone shows up with a competing app and sinks their own. Someone is deliberately steering towards sinking their own app and making the most of it on the way out.

If they have not blocked access to UGC, it this available for download? Setting up a barcode scanner app is pretty simple, connecting it to a pre-existing database is too, so anyone could set up a competing app. The hard work was the database, everything else is a few days' work.

The key for any passenger plane is to be light, and batteries are known to be heavy. They have been getting lighter, but they are still orders of magnitude away from being viable for any practical use. There is no development on the horizon that promises anywhere near what is necessary for commercial passenger flight.

This particular plane took 24 minutes to fly 72 km - that's an average og 180 km/h, a fifth of what commercial jets usually fly at. In fact, assuming there was a somewhat straight road, a car could have raced this plane. Count in the travel to the seaport, the check-in time, and travel from the other seaport, and you are stuck with a far longer travel time than just driving by car.

It's not just a matter of adding more batteries: more batteries will increase the weight, which will increase energy consumption and so on. Battery planes will always be slow, short-range, and with little carrying capacity.

I could not find how many passengers this plane can carry, but I count three side windows, including the pilot's. Since pilots are a major cost to planes, the operation of this plane must be prohibitively expensive on a per-passenger basis.

For short-haul, the most credible zero-emission solution is hydrogen, which has a large advantage in energy density. Still not as good as jet fuel, but good enough. It could get to mid-range if we assume some creative solutions like flying wings with the pressurised or liquid hydrogen tank in the middle, since it needs to reduce the surface-to-volume ratio. For anything else we are stuck with synthetic fuels, which are still expensive but not impossibly so.

If we are discussing about levels of stupidity for discrimination, I would propose that discriminating someone for the colour of their skin, their age, their gender or any other attribute they did not chose themselves is a level dumber than based on what job they chose. Obviously if someone works as a butcher they are not vegan, for example.

On the other hand, most people in caste systems do not choose their jobs, but are restricted to the ones of their caste, which is kind of the point of castes I guess?

Not *great* for long road trips

I beg to differ. I just drove from Mid-Norway to Northern Italy and back (total 5000 km) in a Tesla M3 and that was the easiest ride ever. The car found itself its charging spots (Tesla has their own, but no reason any other brand could not implement the same kind of navigation), and the range was just fine. The car handled well on ridiculously tight roads like Tindevegen and on the Autobahn in Germany.

Part due to Tesla's Autopilot, part due to the fact that EVs do not vibrate as much as ICEs, I drove easily 9-10 hours a day and was not tired at all. Stopping every 300-400 km is perfectly fine - you need yourself to stop anyway to stretch your legs, find a toilet, eat something. In fact I found myself more than once wolfing through a meal because the car indicated it would be ready to drive on within a few minutes.

I did the exact same stretch in an ICE, only one way, with a co-driver and 20 years younger, and it was way more tiring.

Actually it's even older, the US tested a U-233 warhead all the way back in 1955.

Also, Japan has a declared deterrence policy of being able to manufacture a nuke within a few months if they ever were attacked. I would not count them out of the nuclear power list.

Which is why references have their own jargon, where what you don't say weighs a lot more than what you say. You can't be compelled to say good things about your former employees, so if something is missing from the reference it usually means it would have been negative.

"We wish our former employee good luck in their future endeavours" is code for "he'll need it, he's a hack".

As an EV owner, all you need is 2 kW to charge your car overnight. 7-11 kW is total overkill. You have a good 10 h a day at home on an average day, which means 20 kWh of charge, with which you can easily drive 100 km - and you can let that accumulate over multiple days if the battery is larger (which it usually is) to account for days you go out for dinner or to the movies or whatever.

You may have an especially long commute so you could consider upgrading to 3 kW, but no one needs a home charger in the 7-11 kW bracket.

I have a charging station that can be set between 2, 3.5 and 7 kW. My car is a Tesla M3. I always use 2 kW, and if I ever needed more that's what superchargers are for. I think I actually needed 7 kW 1 or 2 times in the last 5 years, and it would have been a lot cheaper to just go to a supercharger and pay up rather than paying the extra copper for the thicker 32 A cable (that's 10 dollars a meter!)

Abraham was reportedly fine with it too.

Now that battery cars are picking up worldwide, there has been a spike in lithium price. Price increased ten-fold during 2021. The war in Ukraine slowed it down a bit, but apparently it's climbing again.

Yes, lithium is (was?) not a major cost in Li-ion batteries. Also other elements increased their price (cobalt, alluminium, nickel, copper), but these are used in other areas than Li-ion batteries and can be influenced by other dynamics; about two thirds of Li goes in batteries, so it is reasonable its price spike is related to battery production.

Nobody uses liquid hydrogen. The energy cost to liquefy hydrogen is far too high and the liquid itself is far too hazardous.

The reason few use LH2 is that there are few plants (e.g. only 4 in all of Europe), and there is little demand. The technology is not that expensive actually, and can be brought down to 5 kWh/kg of hydrogen; as hydrogen holds 33 kWh/kg this is significant, but not a showstopper. In terms of safety, people go around with gasoline tanks all the time and those are far more dangerous overall. In any case LH2 makes sense only for commercial operation, not consumer cars.

pipes made for methane are just not suitable for hydrogen

This is only partly true: most pipes can be reused with some adjustments, e.g. adding a small amount of oxygen (far below the explosion threshold) to create a protective oxide layer on the internal surface of the pipe. Also, many gas grids were originally built for coal gas, half of which was hydrogen.

Tesla is claiming under 2 kWh/mile

Any manufacturer will provide optimistic estimates that not always hold water, e.g. driving at constant speed in flat terrain with no traffic and good weather. It is actually reasonable, they must provide something verifiable.

Batteries are already pretty close to 100% efficiency and there is no way to increase beyond that. Any increase in truck efficiency will be in the driveline, air resistance or regeneration, and can be transferred part & parcel to hydrogen (or even diesel) trucks.

Finally, you need to dimension energy storage for the worst case - e.g. snow storm, one critical charging station unavailable, detours due to e.g. flooding, heavier traffic than expected: you cannot afford a truck sitting without energy in the interstate. It's a nuisance enough for a car, but for a truck it is a major economic loss.

That is just nonsense. People charge when there is suplus solar or wind, or charge at night. No single wire for upgrading needed.

And that is true for private cars, which are parked 95% of the time and have plenty time for slow charging whenever the grid has availability. This does however not apply to trucks (or even taxis), which have to move on a schedule in order to make money. Fast-charging stops are bad enough, degrading the battery, have somewhat lower efficiency than slow charging, and require charging stations in megawatt-size, making battery trucks a significant disruption to the grid.