China is NOT a free nation. When Xi says to do something, all of the businesses and many of the citizens do EXACTLY what he says ( amazing what a bullet to the head of citizens will do for an authoritarian ).
This is why western companies are being destroyed by CHina and when the west fights back, then China simply denies them sales in their nation, while at the same time, dumping on foreign markets to destroy their sales there.

And yet, idiots will continue to say the same thing as the paid chinese astroturfers/trolls say. Sad.

Seriously, this should have a focus on plastics that are NOT easily or even today, recyclable. Things like HPDE is fine. Why? Recyclable. And then we have ABS which is not recyclable, but is ideal for such long-lived things as sewage lines.

This really comes down to use and how recyclable something is.
Even now, I am disgusted that in Seattle, they are saying to NOT recycle aluminum foil that has grease/food on it. Well, that can only mean that the approach for recycling is a horribly cheap one, which likely means that it is going offshore, likely to China. Instead, we should require that ALL trash, recyclables remain within our nation and that we must deal with it correctly.

The definition of reasonable person has been revised downwards.

I suspect most people bought these to flip the bird to the worthless mask culture.

At least now we know forever that paper masks don't do a damn thing for viruses and N95's only work a little for trained wearers.

I'm still seeing mask litter in ditches everywhere. Mass hysteria.

Yes, they are, which is the problem. Razer slapped some RGB LEDs on a mask and sold it.

The norm thirty years ago for a hardware store battery was zinc-carbon, with premium batteries being alkaline. The norm today is alkaline, with fancy batteries having a lithium chemistry. So it's absolutely true that the "regular AA" battery you put in your flashlight back then had something like an 800 mah capacity; there is nothing on the market today that is that weak.

In any case that's primary cells, which have zero relevance to this topic. We're mainly interested in secondary cells, and there the improvements in the common rechargeable battery has been dramatic and continual. Thirty years ago the standard hardware store rechargeable was Ni-Cad; a AA probably had about 700 mah capacity. A modern alkaline AA has a capacity of 2000 mah or so roughly 3x as much. This understates the case because modern rechargeable alkalines can typically be recharged easily twice as much as a 1990s NiCad. And *rechargeable* alkalines are getting significantly better almost year to year.

Of course the hardware store battery only has minimal relevance to what we're talking about. What we really care about is Li-ion, and capacity, lifespan and cost for *those* are improving faster than any other battery technology ever has.

Sounds like they're about to do a massive price hike.

They've started reminding me that I've "saved $11 in shipping costs" when I order a 6-pack of pencils like I'm a drunken fool who has no idea how costs are structured.

No better way to garner good customer will than to end every single transaction with a bald-faced lie!

You're not going to Gish Gallop your way out of this one. You're the one who brought up your personal experience with the price of batteries at the *hardware store* as proof that batteries have not gotten cheaper. I'm actually being charitable in assuming you're talking about shopping for primary cells; if we're talking *rechargeable* cells the argument is even stronger because they are recharged over and over again which means the steady increase of capacity and lifespan in secondary cells over the decades dramatically lowers your lifetime costs.

As documented in my links above, the cost per energy stored of secondary storage has gone done dramatically in the past twenty years, over 90% since 2000. As for why the Tesla Powerwall isn't dirt cheap yet, customers report waiting months from order to delivery; Tesla already has more customers for this product than it can handle at the current price, why would they drop it? This is Tesla milking the early adopter market segment for a product that they can't produce in high enough volume to sell to the pragmatist market segment.

In any case we're not talking about home storage, we're talking *utility* scale grid storatge with is three orders of magnitude larger. There have been economically successful grid storage projects for years now. Hornsdale in Australia earned back its construction costs in just two years [source]. That's probably close to an ideal econmic situation for grid storage, but as costs continue to drop more and more projects that wouldn't quite clear the normal profit bar will become economically feasible.

> There are no trade secrets or anything special in RISC-V.

It's not what's in it that matters, it's what's not in it.

If the Chinese people use chips without backdoors then they will have a global competitive advantage.

Of course Americans could also do that but domestic spying is too important to the fat unearned paychecks of the DC intelligentsia.

Well, the Powerwall 1 was introduced back in April 2015 for a price of $3,000, which is $3,953 in 2024 dollars. The specs said a total of 6.4 kWh with a continuous and peak charge/discharge of 3.3 kW. The inverter was separate, because it was designed to be integrated into an existing solar setup.

The Powerwall 3 was introduced in September 2023 for $7,300 but includes an integrated solar inverter. The specs for it are double the total power at 13.5 kWh, with a continuous charge/discharge of 11.5 kW -- more than triple the original -- and a peak, 10 second draw of 30 kW, about 9 times the original.

So, we're talking more than 3x the device, plus a solar inverter, for less than double the price. Oh, and the original used nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries that were only rated for 5,000 cycles in the warranty. Battery chemistry is now Lithium-Ferrous (Iron)-Phosphate, which is more stable than the NMC and the warranty reflects that at 10-year, unlimited cycles. Oh, and the 3 is expandable with separate "DC packs". That's just batteries without the inverter.

As far as EV replacement batteries, there's a decent market for Nissan Leaf aftermarket batteries. The official, 24 kWh Nissan replacement is $5,500 + install. Third party depends on the current demand, but averaged half that when I last checked and there were even upgrade options (bigger batteries) if you wanted to pimp out your Leaf.

So... yes, batteries are getting substantially cheaper and while the end user may not be seeing the full 90% decrease, we're seeing quite a bit. That full cost decrease is for utility scale buyers.

They only apply Enron standards to protesters and rioters, not corporate execs.

Worse case is the complex total back door hidden in the A5+ gpu silicon that Kaspersky responsibly disclosed.

100% deliberate and not engineering code. Apple was able to patch in a block - for this one that we know about.

It's believed NSA used this backdoor to spy on Tucker Carlson's Signal messages. If they will spy on an American journalist they will spy on SK military generals any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

SK knows what's up and if anyone at Samsung betrays them they have means and methods.

It's true you're paying about the same for a AA battery in the hardware store than you were 30 years ago, if you account for inflation. However a 1990s AA battery would have a capacity of around 800 mAH whereas a modern AA battery offers 2000 mAH or more for the same (adjusted for inflastion) price. So while it *looks* like you're paying more for batteries, you're not if you account for inflation. If you actually look at the number of batteries you to buy over the course of time to power some device, you're actually paying less than 1/3 the price *for the stored energy you get*.

In any case we're not talking about the primary (non-rechargeable batteries) you are buying in the hardware store. We're talking secondary (rechargeable) batteries. In secondary cells the price/per capacity deflation is dramatic. The cost of kWH of lithium ion battery went down by 92% since 2000 [source]. Projections are grid storage costs will continue to drop at dramatic, albeit at somewhat lower rates, so we'll see a cost reduction of about one half in the next seven years [source].

Note this is a conservative projection of of lithium ion technology's evolution. There are multiple promising technologies in the pipeline that could significantly beat this projection. Some of these technologies (e.g. molten metal batteries) promise to be an order of magnitude cheaper if the bugs can get ironed out.

One more: since you can't upgrade later for $150 you have to pay $450 more up front if you'll ever want more.

Better to buy no-name OEM from Taiwan at this point than big American brands.

then CHina would have done it. BOTH of these nations are pushing nuclear weapons into space (though it is far more likely that BOTH have them up there already). How about AmiMoJo? Does your nation have nukes up there?

I'm so glad I got off the Apple bandwagon when they started ignoring the Mac for iPhone.

I actually had linux running on my MBP for a while before buying a PC laptop to when it was time to upgrade.

Every convenience feature is potential spyware when they could have done it cryptographically secure from the beginning.

I actually had a good chat with on-staff cryptographers back in the 90's. This one gal was a genius at elliptic curves

Those were the days.